As one grows older, one forgets what happened last week or last month. But memories from one’s youth stay for ever. I can see, as I write, Alvin Kallicharan trying to on-drive Bishan Bedi in the Delhi Test of 1974. He gets a leading edge, and, as the ball balloons up into the off-side, I hear [...]
Here, in full, is a recent news item in a New Delhi newspaper: ‘When former Chief Justice of India and current Kerala Governor P Sathasivam came to Delhi to attend the wedding reception of BJP chief Amit Shah, he also reached out to various government functionaries to explore the possibility of a Delhi posting — either [...]
I visit Delhi half a dozen times a year. I was most recently there from February 5th to 11th, to fulfil commitments made several months ago, these fortuitously coinciding with the casting and counting of votes in the Delhi elections. Naturally, all my conversations, with friends and strangers alike, were about their party preferences in the [...]
On the 31st of January 1948, a former Indian Civil Service officer named Malcolm Darling, then living in retirement in London, wrote in his diary: ‘Gandhi was assassinated yesterday. … Very difficult to say what will happen, but it is as if a ship has lost its keel. Further disintegration seems inevitable, and what happens to [...]
India, I have long maintained, is a fifty-fifty democracy. In some respects—such as free and fair elections, free movement of people—we are as democratic as any other country in the world. In other respects we lag noticeably behind. One such area is the freedom of expression. The first threat to freedom of expression is the retention [...]
In the early years of this century, people—within and outside India—began speaking of our country emerging as a ‘knowledge superpower’. The proximate reason for this was the country’s then rising software industry. As that sturdy bellwether of the conventional wisdom, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, wrote in 2005, India, once ‘known as a country [...]
Book Review of "Capital: The Eruption of Delhi", Rana Dasgupta, Penguin Press. I The novelist and critic U. R. Ananthamurthy once said that India lives simultaneously in the twelfth and the twenty-first centuries. He might have added: and all the centuries in-between. No city better exemplifies Ananthamurthy’s maxim than the country’s capital, Delhi. The three port [...]
Some twenty years ago, a friend from Mumbai and I were discussing how women were treated in our cities. We both agreed that women were most unsafe in New Delhi, where the hostility to them took both verbal and physical forms. In Kolkata, Chennai, and Ahmedabad, women were rarely abused or attacked in public, so long [...]
Wives of famous men do not always get their due from historians and biographers. Lincoln, Lenin, Churchill, De Gaulle, Lee Kuan Yew— the women they married and whose sacrifices enabled their work are scarcely known to posterity. What is true of politicians is usually true of writers as well. We read and admire Kalidasa, Goethe, Dickens, [...]
‘Commissions of enquiry are often the stock-in-trade of governments to defuse crises and buy themselves time’. Thus writes the historian Gyanesh Kudaisya, in an excellent introduction to a new edition of the Report of the States Reorganization Commission, first published in 1955. The States Reorganization Commission (hereafter SRC) was set up in response to persistent demands [...]