September 2008
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 [...]
THE WORLD’S FIRST ANTI-DAM MOVEMENT, The Hindu
Some fifteen years ago, when the Narmada Bachao Andolan was at its height, the ecologist Madhav Gadgil told me about that movement’s forgotten predecessor. Back in the 1920s, the peasants of Mulshi Peta, near Pune, [...]
June 2008
THE NORTH-EAST AND THE NATION, The Telegraph
Earlier this year I spent ten days travelling through three states of north-eastern India. My journey began in Manipur, where, on my first night, I had dinner with a bunch of academics and journalists. The [...]
EXTREMISM THEN AND NOW, The Hindu
Six weeks after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the (then undivided) Communist Party of India held a party congress in Calcutta. The General Secretary of the CPI was P. C. Joshi, who was of the [...]