SYCOPHANTS AND DEMOCRATS, The Telegraph
One day in the nineteen seventies, Leonid Brezhnev was in a town on Lake Baikal, attending a Politburo meeting. The Soviet Union was in its pomp, whereas the rival superpower [...]
THE FORGOTTEN PRIME MINISTER, The Hindu
Debates may rage on who was India’s best Prime Minister, but there can be no question of who has been its most unjustly forgotten Prime Minister: Lal Bahadur Shastri. This [...]
TWO BROWN SAHIBS, The Hindu
In the days when V. S. Naipaul could still bring himself to praise somebody else, he wrote of C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary that it gave ‘a base [...]
THE EDUCATION OF A PHILISTINE, The Hindu
A British band had come to town, and my eleven-year-old daughter wanted to go hear them sing. I was resistant to the idea. That should have been the end of [...]
THE PROSE OF POETS, The Hindu
When Dom Moraes died earlier this year, most obituaries justly focused on the quality of his verse. With his fellow Mumbaikar Nissim Ezekiel, he made Indo-Anglian poetry respectable. He was [...]
THE SPREAD OF THE SALWAR, The Hindu
Among the most curious of the ‘culture shocks’ I have received was while flipping through the pages of the Islamabad telephone directory. I was in the Pakistani capital for an [...]