The novelist U. R. Anantha Murthy has long objected to the characterization of the Sangh Parivar as the ‘saffron brigade’. Saffron is a beautiful colour, the colour of renunciation, worn by monks and others of great and good character. Why should we cede it so easily to a bunch of bigots? To me, at any rate, [...]
On London’s busy Euston Road, opposite the even busier Euston Station, stands a stone building supported by two large pillars. This is Friends House, the headquarters of the Society of Friends, who are also known as the Quakers. Now, in 2007, the entry to the premises is through the garden at the side; but when Mahatma [...]
On London’s busy Euston Road, opposite the even busier Euston Station, stands a stone building supported by two large pillars. This is Friends House, the headquarters of the Society of Friends, who are also known as the Quakers. Now, in 2007, the entry to the premises is through the garden at the side; but when Mahatma [...]
A friend from Sri Lanka recently visited Bangalore, and not unexpectedly was in a mood of dark depression. The always uneasy cease-fire between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eeelam and the Sri Lankan Government had broken down. Civil war had resumed. Once more, bombs were going off in the heart of Colombo; once more, the Army [...]
‘Public service’ is now a less-than-clean word, associated in the middle-class mind with corruption and nepotism. It was not always so. One of my abiding childhood memories is of opening the door on a winter evening to Bhawani Singh, a peon who worked in the Forest Research Institute. A Garhwali from the Pindari ghati, it was [...]
I have been reading the letters of Macaulay, these printed in a handsome volume published a hundred years ago, and edited by his nephew George Otto Trevelyan. Some forty pages of this book excerpt the letters he wrote to his family and friends from India. It was in June 1834 that Macaulay arrived in the sub-continent. [...]
Earlier this year, the National Archives mounted an exhibition on the founding of the first modern universities in India. A Kolkata newspaper gave its report on this exhibition the headline: ‘The Other Revolution of 1857’. This was apt, for the founding of these universities was indeed a revolution, and indeed also the ‘other’ to the better [...]
‘India lives in her villages’, said Mahatma Gandhi. This is an injunction that the environmental movement in India has taken very seriously indeed. Thus scholars and activists have argued about such matters as the commercial bias in forest policy, the disappearance of species, the drying up of village tanks, and the displacement of adivasis by large [...]
‘India lives in her villages’, said Mahatma Gandhi. This is an injunction that the environmental movement in India has taken very seriously indeed. Thus scholars and activists have argued about such matters as the commercial bias in forest policy, the disappearance of species, the drying up of village tanks, and the displacement of adivasis by large [...]
The recent attacks on Bihari labourers by the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) are criminal acts, and deserve to be treated as such by the security forces, and by the people of Assam. But they also need to be viewed historically, as an undoubtedly perverted manifesation of a popular sentiment that has existed since the [...]