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A bureaucrat is like a bottle of medicine: he comes with an expiry date. He knows, right from his first day in office, the exact day and year on which he has to hang up his boots, and yet most of them are caught unprepared on the appointed day, scrambling to adjust to the changed […]

The bugles have been sounded for the five state elections next year and the General elections in 2024. The BJP, the well oiled election machine that it is, has already made the first moves: it has changed two Chief Ministers and brokered a deal with a third, it has started putting its blue eyed boys

Nadirshah must be laughing all the way home! He has become a household name in Kerala, thanks to Christians; much like the mediocre Danish cartoons on Prophet Mohammad becoming world-famous, thanks to Muslim hotheads. What is Nadirshah up to? More importantly, where are we headed? There are two streams of responses to the two films

     Those joining the IAS come form all religious faiths and creeds, excluding possibly the Mormons and born-again Adventists . But for any IAS probationer training in a district there is only one God- the Deputy Commissioner. The DC( as he is generally known) has all the attributes of divinity, is to be obeyed

These last two weeks have been pretty confounding and humbling for me, both as a generic Indian and a stand-alone Shukla. It’s bad enough to be treated as an idiot by the government of the day, but it’s worse when you start suspecting that the government may be right after all. I no longer get

In his best-selling book, TEN LESSONS FOR A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD, Farid Zakaria makes an interesting point. He says that since the early 1990s, global inequality had been showing a marked decline, both between countries and between people in a particular country. This, he says, ” was caused in large part by sustained economic progress in China,

Only a fool, said G. K. Chesterton, knows life; for only a fool is taken in by life. Prudent people stand aloof, to keep their skin intact. Those who are “prudent” in the world’s eyes become, as Jesus said, like the wheat that ‘remains alone’. Safe, but sterile. Now, the question is: who decides who is a fool,

( Concluding part of the article ) THE WAY FORWARD The pandemic has provided us some important lessons for a sustainable world, the most important being that preservation of the natural environment is not just a matter of landscape aesthetics but an imperative for our own health and survival. This is also a warning for

 [ This is the first of a two- part article on this subject. ] Mr Vir Sanghvi has just sealed the fate of Mashobra, a once idyllic Shimla suburb where I live after my retirement. In an article last week he claimed that Mashobra was ” the new Maldives” of India. Now, Mr. Sanghvi must