Blockchain Privacy Explained: Myths
Mechanisms
Blockchain privacy is not a switch that turns anonymity on or off. It is a chain of technical and operational conditions. A protocol may conceal transaction…
Mechanisms
Mechanisms
Beyond Cricket
The Telegraph
I am a member of the Karnataka State Cricket Association, and I live down the road from the Chinnaswamy Stadium. Yet when the opening game of this year’s Indian Premier League was played there last week, I was at home, not watching the action on television, but reading a recently published book on cricket, albeit about [...]
Scholar-Patriots
Ten Lessons in Intellectual Practice
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 [...]
Gandhi vs Lenin
The Telegraph
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 [...]
Friends and Icons
The Telegraph
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 [...]
Vishwa-Bully
The Telegraph
Ever since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in May 2014, the BJP and the RSS have loudly proclaimed their ambition to make our country a ‘Vishwa-Guru’—Teacher to the World. With every passing month, however, they seem ever further from realizing this ambition. However, whatever our failures in international politics, in the sphere of international cricket India [...]
Justice for the Kashmiris
The Telegraph
In August 2015—almost exactly ten years ago—I visited the Kashmir Valley, and spoke to a cross-section of people from different walks of life. One of them was the journalist Shujaat Bukhari. In January 2015 I had bumped into Bukhari in a Delhi bookshop, and he urged me to visit his home state. When I turned up [...]
Modi vs Indira
The Telegraph
In early June, the senior Congress leader, Jairam Ramesh, began using the hashtag, Emergency@11, in his daily posts charging the Modi Government with various errors, mistakes and crimes. This was in anticipation of what Ramesh knew would come later in the month; namely, the Prime Minister’s invocation of the 50th anniversary of the Emergency imposed by [...]
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 John Hurt. On the other hand, I was just about old enough to remember—and never forget—how Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger [...]
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 to represent. They see India from the National Capital Region, and often from the NCR alone. Their geographical proximity to power [...]