May 2025
My Debt to the American University, The Telegraph
Growing up in the India of the 1970s I had ambivalent feelings towards America. I admired some of their writers (Ernest Hemingway was a particular favourite) and adored the music of Bob Dylan and Mississippi [...]
April 2025
The Great Nicobar Planned Disaster, The Telegraph
No term in Indian public discourse is as egregiously misleading as ‘national media’. For the newspapers, magazines and TV channels that come under this rubric have a narrow, blinkered, view of the nation they claim [...]
February 2025
Lahore Past and Present, The Telegraph
Many years ago, while working on a social history of sport, I came across some news reports of a Test match played in Lahore in 1955. The cricket itself was boring in the extreme. It [...]
January 2025
Constitution@75 Ambedkar’s Warnings, The Telegraph
Indeed, if I may say so, if things go wrong under the new Constitution, the reason will not be that we had a bad Constitution. What we will have to say is, that Man was [...]
Warts and All, The Telegraph
Shortly before he demitted office as Prime Minister in 2014, Manmohan Singh said that history would judge him more generously than the media was then doing. Now, reading the outpouring of adulatory tributes to Singh [...]
December 2024
Baba’s Family, The Telegraph
The first time I knew myself to be in the presence of greatness was while sitting under a shamiana in New Delhi’s Modern School sometime in the last quarter of 1974. I had recently joined [...]