Avay Shukla

I belong to a generation weaned on the liberal arts, and for whom the three Rs meant Reading, Writing and Rithmetic, not Ramrajya, Rashtrawad or Rohingyas. Very early on in my life I decided that the sciences were not for me, and reaffirmed this by consistently failing in Maths from Class VI to Class XI. […]

  I have always believed that politicians, in many important ways, are better human beings than bureaucrats. They can be far more empathetic, sensitive and genuinely helpful than us ” bandh gala” types, throttled by our training, self centeredness and inflated sense of importance. G.S. Bali, who passed away in the early hours of 30th

Anyone with even an iota of intelligence and an understanding of our dysfunctional legal eco-system knows that there is something deeply problematic and rotten with the Aryan Khan case. The NCB’s ( Narcotics Control Bureau) conduct is deeply suspect, even without the personal allegations now levelled against its Zonal Director Sameer Wankhade. The entire case,

In my more lucid moments ( which are now becoming few and far between) I seriously wonder why Himachal has a department of Environment or a Science and Technology Council at all. Neither shows the least interest in either protecting the environment or in exposing the scientific fallacies in the hare-brained schemes regularly manufactured by

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