Columns

Like most youngsters of my generation, I collected stamps, and found them hugely interesting as well as instructive in terms of geography and currencies. However, stamp-collecting did not lead me to any great appreciation of history. That was probably due to the fact that, as the family fortunes were then rather low, I could not […]

At about this time last year my elder son quit his very well paying job as a senior executive in a multi-national: he had had enough of the El Dorado mirage sold by the IIMs and IITs. He had been working 14 hour days non-stop for 16 years, paying Rs. 65000 a month for a

The Himachal Pradesh chief minister recently announced that the state government has identified 50 new locations to develop tourism, including adventure sports. The prospect fills me with dread, because the government’s track record in this respect has been an environmental disaster so far. Forget the mess in Shimla, Manali, Kufri, Mashobra, McLeodganj or Kasauli. In

For the last two weeks now the otherwise tranquil state of Himachal has been roiled in a vortex of Islamophobia, despicable politics, violence and opportunistic silence by those who should be speaking out. Right wing inspired crowds have been flooding the streets of Shimla, Mandi, Solan, Hamirpur and elsewhere, protesting against illegal mosques and “outsiders”(which

Introduction Democracy requires good governance, which in turn, requires high quality policies and institutions which serve as important checks and balances. What matters most for the quality of a democracy, however, is good leadership with vision, wisdom, foresight, ethics, morals, values and principles. If these attributes are either missing or in serious deficit, both policies

India is going through another great Renaissance, as ordained by a gentleman whose own educational qualifications are shrouded in doubt and about which RTI questions will never be answered. All our learnings of the past two thousand years have to be discarded and a new learning, as enshrined in the NEP (New Education Policy) and

In the reasoning of most right thinking people who are alarmed at the direction in which the BJP is taking the country the primary validity and defendability of the TMC govt. in West Bengal stems from its proven ability to keep the BJP at bay in that state. Mamata Banerjee has done this for the

A genre-bending portrayal of family dynamics, societal wealth distribution and caste politics in postcolonial India. It is 1950 and Mewar is reeling from the aftereffects of Partition and the departure of the British. On the day of Makar Sankranti, teenaged beauty Sanaz, the esteemed Dada Bhai’s daughter, is found dead. To add perplexity to the