Those who believe that climate determines social behaviour should take a closer look at the American state of Wisconsin. This is cold in winter and cold in summer. In December, the snow lies high upon the ground; in May, the wind from the lakes cynically neutralizes the rays of the mid-morning sun. Yet despite its deeply [...]
On Independence Day this year I was driving from Bangalore to the small temple town of Melkote. At traffic lights within the city we were hailed by vendors selling the National Flag. When we got to the highway, we passed boys on motor bikes waving the tiranga jhanda. Clearly, the Supreme Court order allowing private citizens [...]
In twenty years as a workaday writer, I have published several million words, of which only about a thousand have actually helped anyone other than myself. These were contained in an article published in a Delhi newspaper in 1992 after the city’s police commissioner summarily evicted the pavement book stalls in Daryaganj, holding them to be [...]
My wife and I were recently discussing people we admired. High on her list was the artist and writer Manjula Padmanabhan. She had just seen Manjula’s evocative graphic ‘Let it Grow’: and had previously read and liked her play Harvest, her illustrated children’s story City Market, and her very adult short story collection, Hot Death, Cold [...]
In the history of Indian cricket, there are really only two competitors for the title of ‘greatest victory ever’: the 1971 series win over England in England, and the defeat of the West Indies in the 1983 World Cup final. In 1971 England were arguably the best side in the world: they had just defeated the [...]
A hundred years this week, a new weekly made its appearance in Johannesburg. Its raison d’etre, as expressed in the inaugural issue, was that ‘the Indian community in South Africa is a recognized factor in the body politic, and a newspaper, voicing its feelings, and specially devoted to its cause, would hardly be considered out of [...]
Recently, in the course of a single week, I met two Indians of very different professional and personal backgrounds, yet commited to the same goal—getting all of India’s children into school. Jean Dreze is an economist of Belgian extraction, who has lived in this country for more than two decades. He took his Ph D at [...]
This essay is inspired, or more accurately perhaps provoked, by an invitation to participate in a cross-cultural symposium on ‘New Trends in South Asian Studies’. The symposium’s organizers suggested that while ‘Europe has long developed research traditions and produced much scholarly work on Asia’, it was ‘only in the last two decades that an increased production [...]
There is a cricket World Cup now in South Africa, and watching the tournament on TV shall doubtless take me back to the one time I did visit the country. That was back in October 1997. Apartheid had recently been vanquished, and the greatest man the world has known since Mahatma Gandhi was in power. The [...]
There is a cricket World Cup now in South Africa, and watching the tournament on TV shall doubtless take me back to the one time I did visit the country. That was back in October 1997. Apartheid had recently been vanquished, and the greatest man the world has known since Mahatma Gandhi was in power. The [...]