Columns

Four years after the Delhi High Court first recommended the name of advocate Saurabh Kirpal for appointment as a judge, a three-member Supreme Court Collegium has finally approved the proposal. While this step itself is very welcome, one needs to wait and see what the final outcome will be and whether he is eventually appointed, […]

In the midst of battling Delhi’s Air Quality Index, one of the worst in the world, I have been thinking of the hold traditions have on our lives. Let me begin by sharing that one of my favourite musicals is “Fiddler on the Roof”, set in rural Russia in the early 20th century. With its

I belong to a generation weaned on the liberal arts, and for whom the three Rs meant Reading, Writing and Rithmetic, not Ramrajya, Rashtrawad or Rohingyas. Very early on in my life I decided that the sciences were not for me, and reaffirmed this by consistently failing in Maths from Class VI to Class XI.

  I have always believed that politicians, in many important ways, are better human beings than bureaucrats. They can be far more empathetic, sensitive and genuinely helpful than us ” bandh gala” types, throttled by our training, self centeredness and inflated sense of importance. G.S. Bali, who passed away in the early hours of 30th

There was a time when I used to frequently visit Ajoy Bhavan which houses the headquarters of the second oldest political party in India, the Communist Party of India. It was founded on Christmas Day in 1925 in Kanpur (though, according to some sources it was founded even earlier). In a few years will celebrate

Anyone with even an iota of intelligence and an understanding of our dysfunctional legal eco-system knows that there is something deeply problematic and rotten with the Aryan Khan case. The NCB’s ( Narcotics Control Bureau) conduct is deeply suspect, even without the personal allegations now levelled against its Zonal Director Sameer Wankhade. The entire case,

As a child, I grew with a poster and a slogan that was ubiquitous everywhere. The slogan read “Hum do, Hamaare do”. The picture was of two children – one small boy and another small girl with the caption “Do ya teen bus”.  Loosely translated as “Two or three – no more”. The slogan was

In my more lucid moments ( which are now becoming few and far between) I seriously wonder why Himachal has a department of Environment or a Science and Technology Council at all. Neither shows the least interest in either protecting the environment or in exposing the scientific fallacies in the hare-brained schemes regularly manufactured by

The last seven days have been a bit of a mixed week for me, somewhat like what the Delhi voter got in 2020 when he voted for Kejriwal : neither fish nor fowl but a chameleon. And for once this dog’s breakfast has nothing to do with our presiding trinity- the alliterative ascetic, the corpulent