Columns

Khushwant Singh would have been delighted. The latest LitFest revived his memory over two days at SOAS in London, the city he loved as much as his birthplace Hadali (in Pakistan). The added piquancy for him was that the sessions began and ended with two Pakistanis.  The Keynote Speaker on 1st June had taken Khushwant’s ashes […]

[DAWN, 23 May 2024] They are all dead: the feisty Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and her fourteen interviewees – prominent amongst them Henry Kissinger, King Hussein of Jordan, Yasser Arafat, Mrs. Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Cypriot president Archbishop Makarios, and the Vietnamese freedom fighters General Giap and

From a letter There’s a letter from Dad to our mother dated the 21st of September, 1938. He’s twenty-one, she’s eighteen. He’s impatient, impetuous and very much in love. Impatient: – “Those damned mails are late by 72 hours. It means that I won’t have any news from you till tomorrow evening.” Wondering: – “What do

When two things happen together, we sometimes conclude that one caused the other. I had made such an assumption about time and healing. In something I wrote, I mentioned the idiom, “Time heals all wounds”. That was spotted by Dr. Valson Thampu, who kindly mentors me, and he gave me the example of Miss Havisham,

I sincerely hope the Hon’ble Lordships who dismissed the petitions for mandatory counting of VVPAT slips (with wholly unwarranted aspersions on the petitioner, the Association for Democratic Reforms) are able to sleep soundly these days. I also hope they have by now realised how misplaced their touching faith in the current Election Commissioners was.  For

by  Paul Shears (FROM The Gandhi Way, U.K., no.: 160, Summer2024) In the late 1920s, the flag of the Indian National Congress was seen flying over a small Christian ashram on the outskirts of Poona (Pune). In a country, and at a time, when the established Anglican Church was closely linked to the British control

I live with a neurological condition called migraine. It is a common malady, especially among women, that shows up with a variety of symptoms ranging from headaches and loss of focus, even to seeing, hearing and feeling things that are not actually there. My experience with migraine was at its worst in 2019. I had

A psychiatrist whom I had a conversation with a few months ago said, “Not everyone wants to heal. Some people choose to suffer. They might even enjoy it, so much so that if they were given a choice, they would refuse to heal.” His statements annoyed me. It seemed both stupid and unrealistic to think

In less than a month on May 25th, the great Libia “Libby” Lobo Sardesai will celebrate her 100th birthday. Unfortunately, like her childhood friend the late artist Francis Newton Souza – the two Goans grew up close to each other at Crawford Market in Bombay – it is deeply shameful that city and country are