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 [...]
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 [...]
January 2003
THE MUSIC OF INDIA, The Hindu
I come from what, even by Indian standards, is a very large family. Counting only close relatives—parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, first cousins—they number in the region of fifty. While I was growing up, of this [...]
December 2002
THE DARLING OF THE DISPOSSESSED, The Hindu
In April 1996, I joined a group of Indian scholars for a meeting in the southern town of Manipal in memory of Mahatma Gandhi. The inaugural address was by Shivarama Karanth, who spoke of his [...]