October 2004
THE SPREAD OF THE SALWAR, The Hindu
Among the most curious of the ‘culture shocks’ I have received was while flipping through the pages of the Islamabad telephone directory. I was in the Pakistani capital for an academic seminar; but had arrived [...]
September 2004
TRUTHS ABOUT THE TRICOLOUR, The Hindu
‘[Karnataka state BJP president Ananth] Kumar said Gujarat BJP unit president Rajendra Singh Rana will hand over the original national Tricolour to Uma [Bharti]. This flag was first hoisted by the great freedom fighter Madam [...]
KEEPING THE WINDOWS OPEN, The Hindu
Writers in Kannada have won seven Jnanpith awards, a record equalled only by one other language, Hindi. But then there are many more speakers of Hindi. And of the seven Kannada awardees three did not [...]
August 2004
THE SOCIOLOGY OF SUICIDE, The Telegraph
Karnataka has a large number of privately run medical and engineering colleges, to which flock students from all over the country. They come in the summer, when, for days upon end, their anxieties and hopes [...]
A MAN TO MATCH HIS MOUNTAINS, The Hindu
On this, the fifty-seventh anniversary of Indian independence, I wish to write about the Indian of my acquaintance who best combines past with present. He is in his early fifties, his name is Shekhar Pathak, [...]
July 2004
EDUCATING OUR WOMEN, The Telegraph
Some years ago, while working on a history of cricket in India, I was reading issues of a now defunct newspaper called the Bombay Sentinel. It took time to get to the sports pages, for [...]