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 [...]
April 2007
THE LAST QUAKER IN INDIA, The Hindu
On London’s busy Euston Road, opposite the even busier Euston Station, stands a stone building supported by two large pillars. This is Friends House, the headquarters of the Society of Friends, who are also known [...]
THE LAST QUAKER IN INDIA, The Hindu
On London’s busy Euston Road, opposite the even busier Euston Station, stands a stone building supported by two large pillars. This is Friends House, the headquarters of the Society of Friends, who are also known [...]
LONG DISTANCE NATIONALISMS, The Telegraph
A friend from Sri Lanka recently visited Bangalore, and not unexpectedly was in a mood of dark depression. The always uneasy cease-fire between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eeelam and the Sri Lankan Government had [...]
March 2007
PUBLIC OFFICE, PRIVATE GAIN, The Telegraph
‘Public service’ is now a less-than-clean word, associated in the middle-class mind with corruption and nepotism. It was not always so. One of my abiding childhood memories is of opening the door on a winter [...]