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Scholar-Patriots, Ten Lessons in Intellectual Practice, The Telegraph

February 21st, 2026|

Those seeking religious or spiritual instruction may need a guru, who teaches and even orders them toward what he considers the correct path. The shishya is asked to follow the guru implicitly and even blindly. However, those who wish to become scholars would be ill-advised to look for a guru. Critical enquiry and original research require one to have a [...]

Gandhi vs Lenin, The Telegraph

December 27th, 2025|

I recently came across a book with the intriguing title, Lenin and Gandhi. Its author was the Austrian writer René Fülöp-Miller. The book was published originally in French; what I read was the English translation, published in 1927. Back in the 1920s, a book-length comparison between Gandhi and Lenin made eminent sense. The two men were near contemporaries, who entered [...]

Friends and Icons, The Telegraph

October 4th, 2025|

In terms of ancestry, I am a fourth-generation resident of Bengaluru. My paternal great-grandfather moved here in the 19th century from a village in the Thanjavur district, to become a lawyer. His children were raised and educated in this town, as were their children, among them my father, who studied at St. Joseph’s College and later at the Indian Institute [...]

Drawing on writings of the past decade-and-a-half, this website of Ramachandra Guha’s writings will be continuously updated to include his columns as they appear. Through these rich and varied essays, Guha seeks to capture the modern history of what he terms the ‘most interesting country in the world’.