October 2019
The Cities That Shaped Gandhi, The Cities That Gandhi Shaped, Hindustan Times
Mahatma Gandhi famously claimed that ‘India lives in her villages’. The focus of his political and social work, and his philosophical writings, was that India was essentially an agrarian civilization, and that it must remain [...]
Searching For Gandhi, Hindustan Times
The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) run to one hundred volumes. Many years before I read these volumes, one by one, their Chief Editor, Professor K. Swaminathan, had satirised scholars like myself in verse: [...]
September 2019
Gandhi and The RSS: The Historical Record, The Telegraph
This column appears days before the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. That anniversary shall be observed at a time when a former pracharark of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh is the country’s Prime Minister, and [...]
The Multiple Tragedies of The Kashmiri Pandits, Hindustan Times
When the ethnic cleansing of the Kashmiri Pandits took place, I was based in Delhi, working at the Institute of Economic Growth. The IEG’s Director was the eminent sociologist Triloki Nath Madan, who had been [...]
Twelve Apostles Of Mahatma Gandhi, Hindustan Times
Many years ago, while working in the Manuscripts Section of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, I found a postcard by an unknown Tamil to that great Indian, Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari, ‘Rajaji’. Written in the late [...]
July 2019
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 [...]