Columns

T.S. Eliot had dubbed April as “the cruelest month” in one of his poems; I am sure he had his reasons for doing so, but it does reveal that he was not one of the 40 million odd Indian taxpayers. For, had he been one, he would have vehemently disagreed- in India, the cruelest month […]

It has been my experience that every District Collectorate is usually haunted by its own resident lunatic, somewhat like ancient mansions possessing their resident spectres who do not look kindly on new arrivals. These benignly deranged persons are usually quite harmless, and in them the spirit of violence is replaced by the litigatious and bureaucratic

Biodiversity is perhaps the most unacknowledged component of the natural environment, and the attention of policy makers rarely goes beyond trees and animals, if even that. But biodiversity is much more than just trees and animals. It is the building block of nature, without which there would be no nature, or an inhabitable planet. Biodiversity

INDONESIA – THE BEAUTIFUL ARCHIPELAGO BY AFTAB SETH PUBLISHED BY BIRCH BOOKS, 2026. There are two types of diplomats, as Mani Shankar Aiyar points out in the review appended to the book. The first are the wolf warriors, of the type so ably represented by Mr Sibi George of the recent press-conference-in- Denmark fame, who

This is not an obituary. Far from it. It is a tribute to someone who is completing the first hundred years of a crowded, productive life. Syed Babar Ali was born on 30 June 1926. For the past few weeks,  numerous relatives, friends, business associates and educationists have joined in celebrating his centenary. Eleven years

Born in 1966 in Ranchi and educated up to his MA in Gaya, Bihar, Tabish Khair did a PhD from Copenhagen University and is now an associate professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. His scholarly books include Babu Fictions (OUP, 2001), The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness (Palgrave, 2009), Literature against Fundamentalism (OUP, 2024) and the co-edited

by Samiksha Ransom “I envy you, Betty. You’re free as a plant.” ~ Tiffany McDaniel, Betty Tiffany McDaniel’s Betty, published by Knopf in 2020, is the coming-of-age, coming-of-voice story of Betty Carpenter. Given the environment in which the author’s mother grew up, the story blends truth and fiction. Betty narrates the story of the women

[It was reported by the Satya Hindi news channel, and reiterated by a Congress spokesperson, that after the declaration of the West Bengal results, the CEC Gyanesh Kumar told a group of reporters: “Tiger abhi zinda hai !”] My faith in the Chief Deletion Commissioner, Mr Gyanesh Kumar (may his tribe decrease), has been fully

Since these are tricky times, let us begin this week with a trick question: what do the following events have in common with each other ? : * The huge, and sometimes violent,  protests in NOIDA last month by factory workers and domestic help over increase in minimum wages. * The refusal of a High