Avay Shukla

The last seven days have been a bit of a mixed week for me, somewhat like what the Delhi voter got in 2020 when he voted for Kejriwal : neither fish nor fowl but a chameleon. And for once this dog’s breakfast has nothing to do with our presiding trinity- the alliterative ascetic, the corpulent […]

I don’t know about you folks, but I found the obiter dicta by a two judge bench of the Supreme Court last week very disturbing. Hearing a petition by a farmers’ organisation ( not connected to the protests) for permission to congregate at Jantar Mantar in Delhi, the bench asked the question: Do the farmers

Circe is the mythical Greek goddess- sorceress who ruled the island of Aeaea; any shipwrecked mariner who landed on its shores was turned into an animal- wolf, lion, swine- a fate which also befell the Greek hero Odysseus. In 1965 Nirad C Chaudhri, the last of the breed of Anglophiles, wrote a book of essays

I have always believed that the houses we build for ourselves have anthropomorphic qualities, that they are as much part of our families as any other member, that they also share our feelings and emotions, that they reflect our own states of mind, that they too have their own destinies just as we do, destinies

In the 2014 and 2019 elections every dimension of the news and social media was completely dominated by the BJP. The so-called mainstream print and television sector had already been or more or less bought out or intimidated into a hallelujah mode. As for Facebook and its subsidiaries Whatsapp and Instagram, one has only to

The vast majority of us ( and I include myself in this list ) are completely unaware of the role that sound – and silence – plays in our lives and mental well being. I was made aware of this recently by a BBC documentary about an App developed by some whizz kid in response

A bureaucrat is like a bottle of medicine: he comes with an expiry date. He knows, right from his first day in office, the exact day and year on which he has to hang up his boots, and yet most of them are caught unprepared on the appointed day, scrambling to adjust to the changed

The bugles have been sounded for the five state elections next year and the General elections in 2024. The BJP, the well oiled election machine that it is, has already made the first moves: it has changed two Chief Ministers and brokered a deal with a third, it has started putting its blue eyed boys