The Dauphin and the Figurehead

Timing is everything, and with a number of state elections soon, leading to the general election next year, the cynicism and opportunism are manifest. The…

Read more

READING THE BAR CODES

“UPON MY WORD: India’s prisons are stuck in a time warp” STRANGE HOW time’s machine travels back and forth at warp speed. Two hundred and…

Read more

Home Truths

And now at the end he found himself in his own house, on his own half-lot of land, his own portion of the earth. That…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

THE DAISY’S PETALS

It’s a NAIL-BITER. I predicted in another column that the Lok pal Search Committee of eight eminent persons might cap a five-year slow waltz just…

Read more

Off the Blocks

For the second time in five years, I was struck by how apposite Rud-yard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ is in relation to Narendra Modi. At one…

Read more