March 2006
NEHRU AND NIRALA, The Hindu
Many years ago, the anthropologist Triloki Nath Pandey told me a story featuring Jawaharlal Nehru and the poet Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’. The Prime Minister had just returned from a visit to the People’s Republic of [...]
LOVE AND HATE BEFORE THE AGE OF BUSH, The Telegraph
For most of its career as an independent nation, India has not had the happiest relations with the United States. In the words of the historian Denis Kux, these have been two ‘estranged democracies’. The [...]
February 2006
HOW MUCH SHOULD A PERSON CONSUME? University of California Press, Chapter IX
"The United States is presiding at a general reorganization of the ways of living throughout the world." André Siegfried, speaking in 1932 This chapter takes as its point of departure an old essay by John [...]
THE FIRST ‘GANDHIAN’ INTELLECTUALS, The Hindu
While Mahatma Gandhi was alive, not many intellectuals would willingly identify themselves as ‘Gandhian’. Writers and thinkers treated him, at best, with a kindly indulgence; and, at worst, with unremitting hostility. The first group admired [...]
THE FIRST ‘GANDHIAN’ INTELLECTUALS, The Hindu
While Mahatma Gandhi was alive, not many intellectuals would willingly identify themselves as ‘Gandhian’. Writers and thinkers treated him, at best, with a kindly indulgence; and, at worst, with unremitting hostility. The first group admired [...]
GANDHI AND SCIENCE, The Telegraph
Shelley once claimed that poets were ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. In the decades and centuries since he said this, it has been scientists rather than poets who have been the world’s legislators, and [...]