Columns

The more discerning among my readers would have noticed that in India the flavours of the season change with, well, the season. In July it was the humble cockroach, in August it was the foot-in-the-mouth Chief Justice of India (again), in September it was the redoubtable Tukaram Mundhe. Come the cold edge of October, and

On 3rd November this year, Aitchison College, Lahore, will celebrate its 140th birthday. It has outlived the former Indian Civil Service which lasted 87 years (1858-1947), and is almost twice the age of the ICS’ successor, the Pakistan Civil Service. In many ways, the path and purpose of Aitchison College have run parallel to both,

Connoisseurs of humour know that all genuine humour is underlaid with wisdom, which provides the actual punch. And so it was that, when I read the recent open letter issued by 124 retired civil servants defending Gyanesh Kumar and his nefarious doings, I was reminded of the sage words of Maurice Switzer: “It is better

The past 250 years has seen a tsunami of revolutions – the American, the French, the Chinese and imitating them, the Cuban. Their waves swept across the world, impacting us today and, as Chairman Mao Zedong has predicted, they will affect tomorrow’s history. This year, friends of America celebrate its first 250 years; its detractors

Only a fool  learns from  his own mistakes, said Otto von Bismarck, the wise man  learns from the mistakes of others. It is now time for policy makers in Himachal , who so far have refused to learn from either their own mistakes or that of Uttarakhand and Wayanad, to imbibe some lessons from the

UKBC – The Record of Our Existence, The Witness of Our Belonging On the eve of Janmashtami, with only a few days left before the curtain rises on UKBC 2026, I am writing this. This is not another emotional Bengali write-up. This is about responsibility. Across  25 different teams, people are quietly working day and

Last week’s article (I Spy, with…) elicited a number of interesting responses. One reader revealed that, in the 1960s, he had worked with John Cairncross – the fifth member of the Cambridge Five.  Cairncross had come to Karachi from FAO in Rome, as part of a Harvard Advisory Group to work with Pakistan’s Planning Commission.

The writing has been on the wall for quite some time, for all to see except perhaps the acolytes of the NDA government. India’s falling governance parameters over the last decade ( Press Freedom, Rule of Law, Inequality, Human Rights, Religious Freedom, Environmental Performance, Academic Freedom) all indicate a gradual structural collapse of the institutions

Now that we have an idea of what Mr. Modi looks like at the stroke of the midnight hour, and have also learnt how to install a teleprompter on a mobile phone, let us move on to some other aspects of the Jantar Mantar protests not yet reported upon. Nothing better exhibits, or symbolises, the