Columns

Only a man with Napoleon’s vision would have seen the potential of linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea by digging a canal. During his campaign in Egypt (1798–1801), Napoleon saw a commercial advantage in shortening the trade route to India. A miscalculation by his engineers caused him to abandon the project. Sixty years later, […]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again for the doubtful benefit of this hearing impaired government- putting old wine in new bottles doesn’t change the wine for the better. A prime example of this is the Indian Railways, their slew of hyped up new trains- Vande Bharat, Tejas, Namo Bharat, etc.- and the claim

Preservation and protection of the natural environment has never been a priority in our annual Budgets; ALL Finance Ministers have taken it for granted and have treated it as an infinite resource rather than a living entity to be nurtured and carefully harvested on a sustainable basis. In July 2014 I had written a blog

THE British Raj has been a long time dying. One vestige — the restaurant Veeraswamy — established 100 years ago in London’s Regent Street, is threatened with closure. Before 1947, visiting Indian aristocracy patronised it. it catered also for ‘India-returns’ — a sentimental breed of white Britishers who wished to recall imperial aromas. The restaurant

ONE has always had the highest admiration and respect for Merryll Streep’ s acting qualities, graceful beauty and composure. To these qualities I should now add her strong moral conviction and the courage to speak out: her take down of Trump at the recent Golden Globe awards function was something to watch, and won her

The Vande Bharat stable of trains is the pride of the Indian railways, and deservedly so. Their coaches are state of the art, comprising the best in the world in technology and comfort, rivalling the airlines at a fraction of the cost. Each set of 16 coaches costs about Rs. 130 crores, ten times the

The First World has Davos, the Middle World has United Nations conferences, and the Third World has LitFests. Davos, UN moots and LitFests serve as a Speaker’s Corner where academics, intellectuals, politicians (serving and retired), movers and shakers collect to ventilate their opinions. Much carbon dioxide is emitted, much ‘sound and fury’ released, but all

I’ve been away from my village in Himachal for the last three months and am beginning to feel homesick; the remedy, Neerja tells me, is to write about the latest news from the state. I can ignore her advice only at my peril, so here goes. But since there is both good news and bad

Political doctrines, like public buildings, are often named after persons. The United States boasts the Lincoln memorial, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, even Washington D.C. itself. America’s very name owes its origins to the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454 – 1512). Had the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller not appropriated the name America for his map of