July 2003
ECOLOGICAL PATRIOT, The Hindu
My wife and I were recently discussing people we admired. High on her list was the artist and writer Manjula Padmanabhan. She had just seen Manjula’s evocative graphic ‘Let it Grow’: and had previously read [...]
June 2003
MEMORIES OF 1983, The Hindu
In the history of Indian cricket, there are really only two competitors for the title of ‘greatest victory ever’: the 1971 series win over England in England, and the defeat of the West Indies in [...]
GANDHI THE JOURNALIST, The Hindu
A hundred years this week, a new weekly made its appearance in Johannesburg. Its raison d’etre, as expressed in the inaugural issue, was that ‘the Indian community in South Africa is a recognized factor in [...]
May 2003
PUBLIC-SPIRITED INDIANS, The Hindu
Recently, in the course of a single week, I met two Indians of very different professional and personal backgrounds, yet commited to the same goal—getting all of India’s children into school. Jean Dreze is an [...]
March 2003
THE ONES WHO STAYED BEHIND, Economic and Political Weekly
This essay is inspired, or more accurately perhaps provoked, by an invitation to participate in a cross-cultural symposium on ‘New Trends in South Asian Studies’. The symposium’s organizers suggested that while ‘Europe has long developed [...]
CRICKET ON THE VELD, The Hindu
There is a cricket World Cup now in South Africa, and watching the tournament on TV shall doubtless take me back to the one time I did visit the country. That was back in October [...]