Columns

“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the spider to the fly, ” Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy.” [ Mary Hewitt. 1829] The road to the Hindu Rashtra, along with that other place most of us are headed for, is paved with good intentions. I refer, of course, to the

The BJP, as a political party, is many bad things in one, but it is not stupid. And right now its canny instinct is telling it that Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra is not good news for 2024 or the coming state elections. The party’s discomfiture and subdued sense of alarm has been evident in

Irony just died a thousand deaths, and Double-Speak became our third official language, with the launch of the Freebie jumla last month. It was, of course, no surprise that Mr. Modi would resort to this red herring in a game where the AAP was running away with the ball. Ball tampering is, after all, part

My chronology, unlike Mr. Amit Shah’s, is fairly straight forward and transparent: I was born in December 1950, joined the IAS in 1975 ( someone had to) , plighted my troth  (and blighted Neerja’s life, according to her mother) in January 1977, retired in December 2010, and am therefore a senior citizen, aka the Walking

It is relatively rare for retired civil servants to join political parties ( though the trend does seem to be increasing of late), and rarer still for those who do to retain the objectivity and value systems that they had been taught in the Academy at Mussoorie. We have only to look at the worthies

Nothing reveals better the depths to which we have sunk as a nation and a polity than the remission granted to the 11 convicts in the Bilkis Bano case, and the events surrounding this depraved decision. One can’t help but notice that the muted reaction to the release of these rapists/ murderers is in sharp

Now that the manufactured frenzy of Independence Day is over ( as if India has never celebrated 15th August before), I am happy to report that it is now apple plucking time in Puranikoti. I have a few apple trees on my land and look after them assiduously: I keep pumping in money for their

I am not aware whether Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Lewis Carrol ever collaborated on a book or not, but had they wanted to, the India of today would have been the perfect subject for them. For it contains elements of  the sinister,  the malevolent and the ridiculous that would have fascinated them. It contains

About four years ago, in an effort to renovate my perennial dumb image, I bought a middle range smart phone. My image has improved marginally since then, but the phone battery is now giving way: it never charges more than 50%, and so I have to charge it at least three times a day, even