August 2010
TWO KINDS OF GLOBALIZATION, The Telegraph
At the beginning of this century, my home town, Bangalore, became a showpiece for the advantages to India of an outward-looking economic policy. The city’s Information Technology industry was generating large amounts of foreign exchange [...]
THREE CHEERS FOR TEST CRICKET, The Telegraph
At close of play on the fourth day of the last Test of the recent India-Sri Lanka series, I rang up the legendary slow bowler Bishan Singh Bedi. The match was intriguingly poised. India needed [...]
A PROPHET ANNOUNCES HIMSELF, Times Literary Supplement
In the third week of September 1909, The Illustrated London News published a withering attack on the idea of Indian nationalism. Its author was G. K. Chesterton, who was then writing a weekly column for [...]
July 2010
AN INSTRUMENT OF THE SELF, The Telegraph
Every year, a music festival is held in Bangalore around Rama Navami. It takes place in Basavanagudi, in the heart of the old City, under a shamiana in the grounds of the Fort High School. [...]
JUSTICE AND THE ADIVASI, The Telegraph
In the summer of 2006, I travelled with a group of scholars and writers through the district of Dantewada, then (as now) the epicentre of the conflict between the Indian State and Maoist rebels. Writing [...]
June 2010
THE ECUMENICAL MARXIST, The Telegraph
The great German sociologist Max Weber once made an important distinction between universities on the one side and religious seminaries and political parties on the other. Seminaries and parties upheld a particular ideology, and made [...]