Wealth and Power in Modern India, New Republic
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 [...]
Why Women Are So Unsafe In Our Cities, Hindustan Times
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, [...]
Good Husband Better Man, The Telegraph
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 [...]
Why Uttar Pradesh Must Be Broken Up, Hindustan Times
‘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 [...]
Religious Faith- Devilish and Divine, The Telegraph
I write this on a day when the front page of the newspaper reports that a Cabinet Minister has visited Rajasthan to consult an astrologer. Meanwhile, a back page photograph [...]
How The Mehtas Conquered Manhattan, Hindustan Times
There is a rich literature on how the culture of modern cities has been nourished by immigrants from other countries. Books have been written on how American writers (from Ernest [...]