January 2016
A Slogan With Substance, The Telegraph
Our Prime Minister likes coining slogans and acronyms. There was Swachh Bharat and Make in India, then Beti Padhao Desh Badhao. Now there is Start up India, Stand Up India. The Planning Commission has become [...]
Searching For Saints In Songs And Pictures, Hindustan Times
I have a decent head for names, dates, places, events, but can remember few snatches of poetry. Truth be told, there are only two pieces of verse that I have committed to memory. Both are [...]
December 2015
Why Bengal Is To India What France Is To The World, The Telegraph
In a book published some years ago, the sociologist Rabindra Ray observed that Bengalis were so obsessed with intellecual pursuits that even their swear words reflected this. In other parts of India, the most common [...]
Why Can’t The Congress Dump The Nehru-Gandhis, The Telegraph
In May 2014, General Elections were held in India as well as in the United Kingdom, the country whose electoral system we adopted as our own. In the UK, the Labour Party got 232 seats, [...]
Narendra Modi And The RSS,The Telegraph
Shortly after the 2014 Indian elections, I wrote that although the new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, was ‘an economic modernizer, in cultural terms he remains a prisoner of the reactionary (not to say medievalist) mind-set [...]
November 2015
Are We Becoming An Election Only Democracy?, Hindustan Times
For some time now, Indian democracy has been corroded by what the sociologist André Béteille terms ‘the chronic mistrust between government and opposition’. Parliament meets rarely— when it does, it resembles a dusty akhara more [...]