THE FIRST ‘GANDHIAN’ INTELLECTUALS, The Hindu
While Mahatma Gandhi was alive, not many intellectuals would willingly identify themselves as ‘Gandhian’. Writers and thinkers treated him, at best, with a kindly indulgence; and, at worst, with unremitting [...]
GANDHI AND SCIENCE, The Telegraph
Shelley once claimed that poets were ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. In the decades and centuries since he said this, it has been scientists rather than poets who have [...]
AN ADIVASI CHAMPION, The Hindu
In the first week of February 2002, I got a call from the writer Mahasweta Devi. I had met Mahasweta only once—in a boarding house in Delhi where we both [...]
AN ADIVASI CHAMPION, The Hindu
In the first week of February 2002, I got a call from the writer Mahasweta Devi. I had met Mahasweta only once—in a boarding house in Delhi where we both [...]
A DIVIDED CITY, The Telegraph
The city I live in has two names, these captured in the title of the first chapter of Janaki Nair’s fine recent book on the city’s history: Bengaluru/Bangalore. As Nair [...]
PRIME MINISTERS AND BIG DAMS, The Hindu
Speaking to the Central Board of Irrigation and Power in November 1958, Jawaharlal Nehru deplored a ‘dangerous outlook developing in India’, which he termed the ‘disease of giganticism’. The ‘idea [...]