March 2019
Dr Martin Luther King’s Dalit Correspondence, Hindustan Times
In February 1959, Dr Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta arrived in India on a three week visit. The American civil rights leader’s pilgrimage to the land of Gandhi has been extensively written about. [...]
February 2019
Why Mahatma Gandhi Would Not Have Wanted A Grand New Temple in Ayodhya, Hindustan Times
In 1932, a young Christian priest named Verrier Elwin was thrown out of his Church. Educated at Oxford, Elwin made his home among the Gonds of central India. He sought to bring education and health [...]
November 2018
Congress Lawyers Past And Present, Hindustan Times
On an April evening in the year 1917, a lawyer named Vallabhbhai Patel was playing bridge at the Gujarat Club in Ahmedabad. This was, for him, a routine affair; every day, after his work at [...]
October 2018
Three World Cities, Hindustan Times
Ten years ago, in the now sadly defunct Mumbai edition of Time Out magazine, I wrote an essay arguing that there were only three properly world cities; London, New York, and Mumbai itself. They all [...]
September 2018
Lessons From Kerala, Hindustan Times
I first went to Kerala in 1993, in the company of the ecologist Madhav Gadgil. We had been asked to speak at a meeting organized by that remarkable peoples’ science organization, the Kerala Sastra Sahitya [...]
July 2018
A Jewel of Bengaluru And India, Hindustan Times
Once, when some of his fellow Hindus were glorifying the practice of sati, Mahatma Gandhi remarked that ‘self-immolation at the death of the husband is not a sign of enlightenment but of gross ignorance’. If [...]