Book Review: My Years in an Indian PrisonÂ
So much is being written about political prisoners in India these days, that the layman might succumb to the temptation of focusing more on the…
Read more
PHILIPPINE GNP SEEN GROWING 6.1 PCT IN 1988
4 April 1988 Reuters News English (c) 1988 Reuters Limited MANILA, April 4, Reuter – The Philippines’ gross national product (GNP) is expected to expand…
PHILIPPINES TO ASK BANKS, IMF FOR NEW LOANSÂ Â
28 July 1988  Reuters News English (c) 1988 Reuters Limited MANILA, July 28, Reuter – The Philippines plans to approach its creditor banks for a…
INDIA LOOKING TO SUBSTANTIAL AID FROM IMF, DONORS, OFFICIAL SAYS
27 August 1991 Reuters News English (c) 1991 Reuters Limited TOKYO, Reuter – India hopes to receive substantial financial aid from a consortium of donors…
INDIA WILL ASK IMF FOR MORE FUNDS – MINISTER
13 April 1992 Reuters News English (c) 1992 Reuters Limited TOKYO, Reuters – India intends to ask the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for more contingency…
Indian reforms are irreversible, lawmaker says
22 April 1993 Reuters News English (c) 1993 Reuters Limited TOKYO, April 22, Reuter – One of the architects of India’s radical economic reforms said…
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…
Wanted- A Big Bang Budget
These are extraordinary times and we witness extraordinary phenomena. Three weeks before the Union Budget, when finance ministers customarily crawl under their carapaces, the honourable…
Modi Unlimited
Coasting down the six-lane highway from Ahmedabad to Gandhinagar, wheels barely touching the asphalt, it is tempting to forget that you are in the India…
A BATTLE SUPREME
Titled Judiciary: At tacks and Survival, the speech had been long in coming, the speaker delayed, first by an attack of diabetes in March and…
MYSTERIOUS U-TURN
Although it is a blasphemous thought, it has cropped up in many a legal mind during the last few weeks: if bets were placed on…
JAGANNATH MISHRA-CLEARED BY THE COURT
HE INDIA-RUBBER man, Jagannath Mishra, had done it again. For months, the Bihar chief minister’s political fate had hung in the balance while the Supreme…
CHEATING THE HANGMAN
Convicted killers Billa and Ranga were expected to make headlines last fortnight. Make news, they certainly did, but not the way everybody anticipated. Instead of…
HANGING FIRE
The Quality of justice seemed to be under tremendous strain last fortnight. At issue was the vexatious question of capital punishment. As usual, the shock…
UNTIL DEATH DO US PART
No Amount of civilised debate can take away from the savagery of the traditional Indian marriage. In the last few weeks, eight women have died…
SNAG IN THE ROPE
Anticlimax has become the boon companion of the Supreme Court. When the court reopened on July 18 after its summer vacation, it was shadowed by…
The Method Man
Gujarat’s Chief Minister tells Chaitanya kalbag in a wide-ranging interview that policy and process make a heady development cocktail Narendra Modi is not a tall…
Scrabbling Away From the Abyss
Nitish Kumar’s victory in last month’s Bihar election celebrates the triumph of economics over feudalism, but the climb out of poverty will be steep and…
Panic Button
Reading An Account of the Great Fear, or Grande Peur, that swept across France in July and August of 1789, I was struck by the…
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…
GREAT STRESS TEST
Since you all love acronyms for the Good and Simple Tax and the Grand Stupid Thought, the headline is my humble contribution to your lexicon.…
HOLLOWING OUT
Privatisation will work only when the government sells more than 50 per cent of a state-owned company’s capital to the public and relinquishes management control.…
SELL SELL SELL
Two numbers speak eloquently about our schizophrenia over privatisation: the Rs 2.11trillion ($32.5 billion) package announced on October 24 to recapitalise public-sector banks (PSBs); and…
BHAG PIYUSH BHAG
Piyush Goyal is a chartered accountant, lawyer, former investment banker, former Bharatiya Janata Party treasurer, and a go-getter. Goyal, who likes taking leadership courses (currently…
HOW TO MAKE MORE WITH LESS
How much a hurry is prime minister Narender Modi in? It depends on your horizon. By one measure, he has 22 months, but then he…
TOO BIG TO FAIL
Independence day is a good excuse for some economic chest-thumping. We should be proud that lndia is a free-enterprise democracy. Imagine the world’s burden if…
Glass Half-Full?
We can hope that in the run-up to the next general election we will not suffer the type of jolts to our nervous systems that…
TELLING NUMBERS
Look Carefully at all the Headlines, screaming or otherwise, that are popping up these days about corruption. How many of them feature women? Study after…
VIRAL FEVER
Start exercise your smartphone thumb, because the next big election will be fought on our mobiles. The latest Internet and Mobile Association of India survey…
RED-LETTER DAYS
This is a year of anniversaries , some unpleasant, some prescient, some momentous. CE 2019 is important not only because of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s…
NaMo the FMCG
If you want to decompress from the 2019 election campaign, and haven’t already donned the colours to be a cheering face in a shouting crowd…
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…