July 2018
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 [...]
May 2018
Three Things Karl Marx Got Mostly Right, Hindustan Times
In the course of doing two degrees in economics I was taught to regard Karl Marx as, in the words of the Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson, a ‘minor post-Ricardian’. His labour theory of value [...]
April 2018
Between Rectitude And Responsibility, The Telegraph
One of my closest male friends is a senior IAS officer, now retired. He belongs to a family of scholars and public servants, and has degrees from two of the world’s great universities. He has [...]
Choosing The Ten Greatest Indians, Hindustan Times
When, in August 2017, India marked the seventieth year of its freedom from British colonial rule, the Hindustan Times did a series of long stories on seventy of this and seventy of that: the seventy [...]
October 2017
A Forgotten Precursor To The Rushdie Affair, The Telegraph
In the winter of 1988-9, there occurred what became known as the ‘Rushdie Affair’. Salman Rushdie had just published his novel The Satanic Verses, which orthodox Muslims denounced as having defamed the image of Prophet [...]