On 13th December 1946, Jawaharlal Nehru moved the Objectives Resolution in the Constituent Assembly of India. This proclaimed that the soon-to-be-free nation would be an ‘Independent Sovereign Republic’. Its Constitution would guarantee citizens ‘justice, social, economic and political; equality of status; of opportunity, and before the law; freedom of thought, expression, belief, faith, worship, vocation, association [...]
We Indians are very insecure about our heroes. A scholar who retold, without endorsing them, some old stories about Shivaji’s parentage found his book banned and burnt. A writer who made some disparaging remarks about Rabindranath Tagore was censured by the West Bengal Assembly. Another writer was roughed up after he wrote a (admittedly nasty) book [...]
In the last days of 1884, an English politician named Randolph Churchill landed in Bombay. Then in his mid thirties, he was a rising star of the Conservative Party, who had made his name by a series of withering attacks on the policies in Africa of the great Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. Churchill was [...]
How one reads the protests by the Governments of Iran and Pakistan at Salman Rushdie being made a knight depends on where one is placed on the political spectrum. Those who incline to the right might dismiss it as yet another illustration of the illiberalism of Islam. On the other hand, some on the left might [...]
Choosing a cricket team (real or hypothetical) is an exercise fraught with danger, for you and me as much as for the chairman of selectors. Where the chairman of selectors is interrogated by the media, you and me are chastised by our friends, an experience that is scarcely more pleasant for being more private. In this [...]
The day the U. P. election results came in I was having lunch with a friend in Mumbai. ‘Mayawati appears to be the Jayalalithaa of the South’, he said, before passing on to other matters. But his remark stayed with me; the more I thought about it, the more the comparison made sense. Mayawati and Jayalalithaa [...]
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 [...]