ANYONE who attended the ThinkFest on Jan 11-12 in Lahore hoping to walk away with a panacea to Pakistan’s ailments, must have been disappointed. The ThinkFest was a master class in dissection of a living corpse. The discussants — scholars, politicians, a former prime and finance minister, serving and retired government officials, artistes, cricketers, financiers […]
Himachal is gradually slipping into a financial sink-hole, with a debt of Rs.85000 crore and almost 60% of its annual budget going to pay just employees’ salaries/pensions and debt servicing. The Union government, for vindictive political reasons, is further nudging it into the hole by denying it almost Rs.9000 crores of PDNA (Post Disaster National
Himachal Has No Option But To Bite The Financial Bullet Read More »
[DAWN, 9 Jan., 2025] To reassemble the origins of Pakistan, one needs time, money and luck. Collectors of deltiology (the study and collection of postcards) need all three to make sense of Pakistan’s jigsaw chronology. Our country’s visual history is a scattered puzzle, with pieces that are 5,000 years old with an undeciphered alphabet, a
I have little or no sympathy for those doubting Thomases who continue to question the stupendous growth of our economy-such people should be packed off to one of the coral reefs around the Great Nicobar, which shall soon be ground to dust once the mega-crony project there takes off; it will serve them right. For
GST-NOMICS : HOW TO EAT YOUR POPCORN AND TAX IT TOO Read More »
A review of Betrayed by Hope, a play-script by Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal, delves into the tumultuous life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Based on his letters, this genre-bending work brings to life the complex intersections of art, culture, and colonialism in 19th-century Bengal. What does it mean to resuscitate, in art, a life
Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal’s ‘Betrayed by Hope’: A review Read More »
THE PERPETUAL OUTSIDER I first heard of Mani Shankar Aiyar sometime in 1990 when I was serving with Mr. I.K. Gujral, the Minister of External Affairs in V.P. Singh’s government. The Pakistan Foreign Minster had called on Mr. Gujral at South Block and they were reminiscing over old times when the conversation turned to Indian
BOOK REVIEW – A MAVERICK IN POLITICS by MANI SHANKAR AIYAR Read More »
Arundhati Roy was recently awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. At the same time, several powerful individuals in her home country called for her to be convicted under anti-terror legislation. The charge? A comment in 2010 during a conference where Roy stated that Kashmir was never an integral part of India. So is Roy a
Arundhati Roy’s fiction. Life and Love in the Margins Read More »
In his seminal and thought provoking book, HOMO DEUS, Yuval Noah Harari has some very interesting observations about mankind’s quest for immortality. He postulates that, having triumphed over starvation (famines), disease (plagues) and violence (war),- the primary cause of deaths over the centuries- mankind in the 21st and 22nd centuries will strive to conquer death
Digital Immortality Is Already Here! Read More »
This has been a particularly bad year for Himachal and its embattled Chief Minister, Mr. Sukhu. He has certainly grabbed the TRPs but they are of the negative, Arnab Goswami and Navika Kumar type. Actually, the year began well, in pure eye-ball terms, with our own raging torrent, Kangana Ranaut, occupying the headlines with her
HIMACHAL’ S GAME OF SNACKS AND LADDERS Read More »
