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 [...]
REFORMING THE HINDUS, The Hindu
Three men did most to make Hinduism a modern faith. Of these the first was not recognized as a Hindu by the Shankaracharyas; the second was not recognized as a Hindu by himself; the third [...]
VIGNETTES OF VAJPAYEE, The Hindu
In the last weeks of 1999, I was the recipient of a phone call from a Delhi bibliophile I knew slightly. The Prime Minister’s family, he said, felt that the time had come to suitably [...]
June 2004
PASSAGES THROUGH INDIA , The Hindu
There is a wonderful book waiting to be written about Western representations of India in the twentieth century. Before and after Independence, the sub-continent attracted an array of foreign writers determined to dig up the [...]