Columns

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 […]

The Air India board meets today, May the 7th, to address the challenges of record financial losses, future strategy, and CEO succession. A good opportunity for everyone who leads any organization (or even a team) to reflect on the lessons for each of us. __ During my teenage years, Air India was a global leader,

Civilisations are created by poets, writers, painters, architects, but are destroyed by politicians and their armies. We would do well to remember this truth at a time when an existential civilisational war is taking place almost on our borders, in West Asia. Make no mistake, the illegal assaults on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran are

[Published by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta. 2025] Before we get into this thought provoking book two things need to be said about it. One, it reaffirms that courageous journalism and writing still breathes in India, notwithstanding the utter capitulation of most of the shameful media to power and commerce. Second, the book raises troubling questions about

Recent events have given a new twist to history. A Chicago-born Pontiff from Rome has publicly rebuked an American Christian crusader. Normally, popes issue insipid encyclicals or harmless homilies. In 1968, for example, Pope Paul VI issued ‘Of Human Life’ – a justification of the Catholic Church’s opposition to methods of birth control. (One sceptic

I’ve been feeling a bit low these last few months, enveloped in a feeling of missing out on something, what the acronym generation would term FOMO- Feeling Of Missing Out, but is actually more of FOBLO- a Feeling Of Being Left Out. Somewhat like Sanju Samson being left out of the team for the first

It’s a disturbing sign of the times that the global levers of power today are controlled by genocidal murderers, sex offenders, megalomaniacs, war criminals and rapacious billionaires who should all be in jail. Collectively, these psychopaths are driving the human race ever closer to the seventh mass extermination, this time of homo sapiens- which is

WILL the world see another Nuremberg Trial? Or is accountability only for the history books? In 1946, an International Military Tribunal representing the victorious Allied powers (the US, UK, USSR and France) passed judgement at Nuremberg on 24 Nazi acolytes of Hitler. They included Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess and Joachim von Ribbentrop. At the Potsdam

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,