October 2008
THE CERTITUDE OF CONQUERORS, The Hindu
I have been reading A. N. Wilson’s book After the Victorians, a survey of British social and political life in the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike some other British historians, Wilson is aware [...]
September 2008
A FORGOTTEN BENGALI HERO, The Telegraph
Nothing gives the historian greater joy than to discover an individual significant in his time but forgotten in our own. I was thus very pleased to have brought, to the attention of the present generation, [...]
RAJIV RE-ASSESSED, Hindustan Times
I think it was Voltaire who said that while we can flatter the living, the dead deserve nothing less than the truth. I recalled that injunction when reading Vir Sanghvi’s tribute to the late Rajiv [...]
THE IMPURITY OF CULTURES, The Hindu
In the 1950s, inspired by Jawaharlal Nehru, some very brilliant young Indians went into the Foreign Service. Among them was the Rhodes scholar Peter Lynn Sinai. A former Ambassador to Austria and Iraq, Mr Sinai [...]
August 2008
MYTHS AND BORDERS, The Hindu
Foreign dignitaries who come to India almost always fly in to the nation’s capital, New Delhi. In April 2005, however, the Prime Minister of the Peoples’ Republic of China chose first to visit my home [...]
July 2008
FOUR VIEWS OF HINDUS AND MUSLIMS, The Hindu
I have recently been re-reading Bunch of Thoughts, a collection of talks by M. S. Golwalkar published in Bangalore in 1966. Golwalkar was the long-time sarsanghchalak, or head, of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, an organization [...]