We had hailed the verdict of 2009 as an affirmation of the rise of an aspirational new India, leaving behind the old politics of grievance. The mandate of 2014 is a logical step forward. Aspirational voters are also impatient, unforgiving, uncluttered and more transactional. You come to them seeking the supreme gift in a democracy,...
It’s been a decade since Kolkata ceded to Mumbai its pre-eminence in globalising popular culture and serious literature. From Suketu Mehta (Maximum City) to Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers) through Gregory David Roberts’s Shantaram and Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, Mumbai is our most studied, psychoanalysed, romanticised and feared city. Interludes of scams (Adarsh) and...
YOU have to be ridiculously parochial to say something as outrageous as what Haryana thinks today, India thinks tomorrow. Risks rise further when you work out of a newsroom spilling over with Bengalis. But that is an old and truly genuine grievance with us Haryanvis. That we have always been denied our due as real...
The talk,wherever you go chasing elections in Uttar Pradesh,is about education,jobs,better life,aspiration. Why we call this random series of writings from different and diverse parts of India,often during the elections,Writings on the Wall needs repetition. So many years of training as a reporter-writer have taught me that one of the best ways of figuring out...
At our usual gossip sessions in Mumbai over coffee earlier this week with a particularly cerebral star of corporate India (who had better go unnamed for his own good), the talk shifted to the current obsession in his universe: our governance paralysis. Where government has no leader whose writ runs, and where everybody seems to...
From finding Tamil guerilla camps in 1984 to checking up on lost friends last week in Colombo This new, occasional series should, in fairness, be a thank-you note to Shoojit Sircar, one of our new breed of young and thinking filmmakers. His latest Madras Café marks a new beginning in Hindi cinema. Unlike Bhaag Milkha...
Two vigilant readers have pointed out a factual error each in my series on the Sri Lankan war published earlier this week. I regret both and have corrected them in the web edition. Respected intellectual and industrialist Vinay Bharat Ram has written that P. Chidambaram was a graduate of Harvard Business School, and not law...
This is one box nobody would like to check on his CV. Not even the most battle-hardened hack. But, early in September of 1989, I found myself in the wrongest place at the wrongest time. And witnessed my first, and hopefully only, live (apologies for that horrible malapropism, but we are all brainwashed by news...
Last Saturday (August 17), at a dignified little ceremony at 7, Race Course Road, the prime minister released the fourth volume of the history of the Reserve Bank of India. There was, however, a certain apologetic mournfulness in that select gathering of no more than 30 of India’s topmost economic and monetary policymakers. It did,...
There are a few things you can say with some certainty on the Ishrat Jahan case: that there is a great deal of smoke to suggest that at least three members of the group were involved with really bad guys. Second, that there is no evidence at all at least not yet that they were...