This week marks the fortieth anniversary of the release of Richard Attenborough’s epic film Gandhi. Attenborough’s papers are located in an archive an hour’s train ride from London. Visiting them recently, I found several files of reviews of the most significant (some would say only worthwhile) film that the director made. They included an assessment in [...]
In 1922, a professor at Lucknow University named Radhakamal Mukherjee published a book called Principles of Comparative Economics. Reading the book one hundred years later, I was struck by the attention it paid to the impact of the natural environment on the social and economic life of Indian villages. Mukherjee was perhaps the first Indian scholar [...]
At a conference last month, I met the Director of one of our prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. Himself a fine scientist and excellent administrator, he told me that no fewer than eight IITs were currently without Directors. In each case, the term of the previous incumbent had ended, and though a search committee had been [...]
In an earlier column (The Telegraph, 13th August), I provided a brief analytical history of India’s democratic institutions since Independence. In this column, I offer a list of non-fiction books that I have myself found useful in understanding the complicated career of our Republic. I would have liked to choose seventy-five books, both in the interests [...]
As a member of the Karnataka State Cricket Association I have free entry to all matches played at the Chinnaswamy Stadium. However, I have never exercised that privilege in the case of the Indian Premier League. More or less my only IPL memory is from the first edition of the tournament, when, dining in a Bangalore [...]
Although I grew up in north India, the newspaper that came into our home was headquartered in a great city then called Calcutta. This was The Statesman, whose main edition was published in the first capital of British India, but which had a small subsidiary edition printed in the second and last capital of the Raj. [...]
I have been thinking a great deal about South Africa these past few weeks, in part because of the Test series being played there, but mostly because of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, with whose passing the last of the great stalwarts of the anti-apartheid struggle has left the stage. Although best known for the work he did [...]
One of the most remarkable individuals I have known was K. Swaminathan, a professor of literature from Madras who went on to become Chief Editor of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Swaminathan was born in the town of Pudukkotai on 3rd December 1896. When his centenary was observed in 1996, I wrote a biographical profile [...]
When, in 1995, Bombay was renamed Mumbai, it led to a spurt of such renamings of buildings, streets, parks, and railway stations in the city. However, a few dead foreigners were spared the fate of being consigned to the dustbin of history. Among them were Annie Besant, after whom a major thoroughfare in central Mumbai is [...]
In 1931, the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress was held in the port city of Karachi. Vallabhbhai Patel was elected President. Early in his address, Patel remarked: ‘You have called a simple farmer to the highest office to which any Indian can aspire. I am conscious that your choice of me as first servant [...]