May 2005
THE MERITS OF MARTYRDOM, The Hindu
This week forty-one years ago, I was hustled out of my school in the (then) little hill town of Dehradun to watch a helicopter land. In that age and place, vehicles that flew were rare [...]
THE BOMBAY-KARNATAK CONNECTION, The Hindu
The state of Karnataka is made up of three sections, each previously part of another political regime. There is ‘Old Mysore’, the districts in the south which once belonged to the princely state of that [...]
April 2005
WHERE LEFT MEETS RIGHT, The Telegraph
Earlier this year, I was at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, where I had been asked to given an after-dinner talk to the students. I reached ten minutes before schedule, so my hosts [...]
STUNG BY THE WEST, The Telegraph
Back in the 1850s, Karl Marx wrote a series of essays on the results of British rule in India. These essays were marked by an ambivalence that was uncharacteristic as well as profound. On the [...]
March 2005
PUNJAB PAST AND PRESENT, The Hindu
I first visited Punjab in the summer of 1973, to play a cricket match in Patiala. Later that same year occurred an event of some significance in the history of Punjab and India. In October [...]
January 2005
DEFACING THE MAHATMA, The Hindu
On 30th January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was murdered by a right-wing fanatic named Nathuram Godse. The act shamed most Indians—but not all. For there has always been a significant minority who have been on the [...]