Earthy Tales

Last week I was on a flight to Mumbai About two hours in, the captain an- nounced that there was unseasonal heavy rain ahead and…

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CALCUTTA IS FOEVER

Thirty years ago, a dishevelled man leaned across and shouted at me in the smoke-filled, raucous Olympia bar on Calcutta’s Park Street: “Calcutta is forever!”…

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The Takeover Man

Most of us are cursed with poor memory. We need episodic markers to help us measure our lives from one significant remembrance to another. Our…

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FRIEND IN NEED

The Rashtriya Swyamsewak Sangh (Rss) is everybody’s favourite bugbear. So perhaps it was inevitable that it would be accused of having a hand in the…

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Spate Of Senseless Tragedies

Qutab Minar, the 72.5-metre-high monolithic tower that Iltutmish built 750 years ago, witnessed two shocks in its hoary life-span. In 1368, it was struck by…

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THE WEAGES OF WRATH

ON January 18 the strike by 2.5 lakh textile workers in Bombay’s 60 mills will complete a year; 25,000 of these workers in eight mills…

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STONE AGE SHAKTI

That Trite phrase ‘as old as the hills’ has suddenly taken on startling significance in relation to a thread that runs through Hindu beliefs: the…

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AN HEIR SPLITTING LEGACY

The story is as complicated as the whorls on a fingerprint, a ready-made screen-play bursting with grandeur, feudalism, pretension, and the tattered remnants of pomp…

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