January 2015
Why Women Are So Unsafe In Our Cities, Hindustan Times
Some twenty years ago, a friend from Mumbai and I were discussing how women were treated in our cities. We both agreed that women were most unsafe in New Delhi, where the hostility to them [...]
December 2014
Good Husband Better Man, The Telegraph
Wives of famous men do not always get their due from historians and biographers. Lincoln, Lenin, Churchill, De Gaulle, Lee Kuan Yew— the women they married and whose sacrifices enabled their work are scarcely known [...]
Why Uttar Pradesh Must Be Broken Up, Hindustan Times
‘Commissions of enquiry are often the stock-in-trade of governments to defuse crises and buy themselves time’. Thus writes the historian Gyanesh Kudaisya, in an excellent introduction to a new edition of the Report of the [...]
November 2014
Religious Faith- Devilish and Divine, The Telegraph
I write this on a day when the front page of the newspaper reports that a Cabinet Minister has visited Rajasthan to consult an astrologer. Meanwhile, a back page photograph in the same paper shows [...]
How The Mehtas Conquered Manhattan, Hindustan Times
There is a rich literature on how the culture of modern cities has been nourished by immigrants from other countries. Books have been written on how American writers (from Ernest Hemingway and Richard Wright on [...]
October 2014
Nehru and Patel, Hindustan Times
The best biography of Vallabhbhai Patel was written by Rajmohan Gandhi. Based on full access to Patel’s own papers, it is a rich account of his life and struggles, set against the context of the [...]