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 [...]
Speaking Satire To Power, The Telegraph
Milan Kundera once spoke of the importance, for subjects of a totalitarian regime, of ‘the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ As important, to the citizens of a (professedly) democratic regime, is the struggle of satire [...]
June 2018
When The State Took A Poet To The People, The Telegraph
In some Western countries, copyright to an author’s work lapses seventy-five years after his or her death. In India, the time period is slightly shorter; sixty years. Thus, until 2001 the copyright in Rabindranath [...]