/2018

Congress Lawyers Past And Present


Hindustan Times

On an April evening in the year 1917, a lawyer named Vallabhbhai Patel was playing bridge at the Gujarat Club in Ahmedabad. This was, for him, a routine affair; every day, after his work at the Bar ended, he headed straight for the card table. This evening in April 1917 was different. Earlier in the day, [...]

Three World Cities


Hindustan Times

Ten years ago, in the now sadly defunct Mumbai edition of Time Out magazine, I wrote an essay arguing that there were only three properly world cities; London, New York, and Mumbai itself. They all had an extraordinary diversity of religious, ethnic and linguistic groups; all were great centres of trade, finance, and entrepreneurship; all had [...]

Lessons From Kerala


Hindustan Times

I first went to Kerala in 1993, in the company of the ecologist Madhav Gadgil. We had been asked to speak at a meeting organized by that remarkable peoples’ science organization, the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad. We were received at Ernakulam Railway Station by the zoologist M. K. Prasad, a doyen of the KSSP. Despite his [...]

A Jewel of Bengaluru And India


Hindustan Times

Once, when some of his fellow Hindus were glorifying the practice of sati, Mahatma Gandhi remarked that ‘self-immolation at the death of the husband is not a sign of enlightenment but of gross ignorance’. If she truly loved her deceased husband, said Gandhi, the wife would not commit sati but dedicate her life to the fulfilment [...]

Speaking Satire To Power


The Telegraph

Milan Kundera once spoke of the importance, for subjects of a totalitarian regime, of  ‘the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ As important, to the  citizens of a (professedly) democratic regime, is the struggle of satire against power. Rahul Gandhi has been the butt of jokes ever since he entered politics, and, more recently, Narendra Modi has [...]

When The State Took A Poet To The People


The Telegraph

In some Western countries, copyright to an author’s work lapses seventy-five years after his or her death. In India, the time period is slightly shorter; sixty years. Thus, until 2001 the copyright in Rabindranath Tagore’s writings vested with Santiniketan; till 2008, it was Navajivan Press which controlled access to Mahatma Gandhi’s oeuvre. The copyright in [...]

Three Things Karl Marx Got Mostly Right


Hindustan Times

In the course of doing two degrees in economics I was taught to regard Karl Marx as, in the words of the Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson, a ‘minor post-Ricardian’. His labour theory of value was rejected by my teachers; and his predictions about the immiserization of the proletariat and the imminent death of capitalism appeared [...]

Between Rectitude And Responsibility


The Telegraph

One of my closest male friends is a senior IAS officer, now retired. He belongs to a family of scholars and public servants, and has degrees from two of the world’s great universities. He has some special areas of expertise, such as education and health, and speaks four Indian languages fluently. With these skills, and without [...]

Choosing The Ten Greatest Indians


Hindustan Times

When, in August 2017, India marked the seventieth year of its freedom from British colonial rule, the Hindustan Times did a series of long stories on seventy of this and seventy of that: the seventy best books written since Independence, the seventy greatest sportspersons since Independence, the seventy finest films since Independence, the seventy most influential [...]