July 2007
OPEN SEASON ON GANDHI AND NEHRU, Hindustan Times
We Indians are very insecure about our heroes. A scholar who retold, without endorsing them, some old stories about Shivaji’s parentage found his book banned and burnt. A writer who made some disparaging remarks about [...]
CHURCHILL PÉRE AND INDIA, The Hindu
In the last days of 1884, an English politician named Randolph Churchill landed in Bombay. Then in his mid thirties, he was a rising star of the Conservative Party, who had made his name by [...]
June 2007
TWO CHEERS FOR BLASPHEMY, Hindustan Times
How one reads the protests by the Governments of Iran and Pakistan at Salman Rushdie being made a knight depends on where one is placed on the political spectrum. Those who incline to the right [...]
FIVE OF THE BEST, The Hindu
Choosing a cricket team (real or hypothetical) is an exercise fraught with danger, for you and me as much as for the chairman of selectors. Where the chairman of selectors is interrogated by the media, [...]
May 2007
POWER WOMEN OF NORTH AND SOUTH, The Telegraph
The day the U. P. election results came in I was having lunch with a friend in Mumbai. ‘Mayawati appears to be the Jayalalithaa of the South’, he said, before passing on to other matters. [...]
WHO IS A PATRIOT? , The Telegraph
The novelist U. R. Anantha Murthy has long objected to the characterization of the Sangh Parivar as the ‘saffron brigade’. Saffron is a beautiful colour, the colour of renunciation, worn by monks and others of [...]