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Appreciating Ambedkar

The Telegraph

In my personal list of books every Indian must read, four stand paramount. These, in order of their year of first publication, are M. K. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909), Rabindranath Tagore’s Nationalism (1917), B. R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (1936), and Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India (1946). These works are both timely and timeless, speaking [...]

Attenborough Revisited

The Telegraph

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 Praise of Ian Jack

The Telegraph

In the course of my life, I have met many remarkable men, who have distinguished themselves as scholars, writers, artists, sportsmen, scientists, entrepreneurs, politicians, and activists. These men, almost without exception, have had a high sense of self-regard. As the Hindustani expression goes, ‘apne ko bahut samajhte hain’. Some are crudely boastful about their achievements; others [...]

50 for 75 – An Independent India Reading List

The Telegraph

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 [...]

The Real Game – The joys of watching cricket in whites

The Telegraph

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 [...]

Growing Old with the Telegraph

The Telegraph

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. [...]

Memories of 1971

The Telegraph

The city outside India I know best is London, and the place in London I know best is the British Library, where, for thirty years and counting, I have scoured the capacious collections pertaining to the history of colonial India. I must have worked there for at least a thousand days all told, always following the [...]

Why our Classical Music may be the Best Antidote to our Chauvinism

The Telegraph

Most evenings, I knock off from work and listen to Indian classical music for an hour or so before dinner. In the past, I would play CDs or cassettes I had collected over the years; now, I forage through the capacious repository that is YouTube. Sometimes I select an artist or a particular raga; at other [...]

Standing With Gandhi in Ahmedabad

Hindustan Times

On 30th January I was in Ahmedabad, a city that was central to Mahatma Gandhi’s life and work. It was here that he established the most celebrated of his ashrams, on the banks of the Sabarmati River; here that he revised and refined his moral and political philosophy; here that he conceived and planned the Rowlatt [...]

The Liquid That Will Determine Our Future

The Telegraph

Many years ago, I came across this striking definition of ecological responsibility: ‘If we produce everything we want from within a limited area, we are in a position to supervise the methods of production; while if we draw our requirements from the ends of the earth it becomes impossible for us to guarantee the conditions of [...]