Columns

October is the month we remember Mahatma Gandhi as his birth anniversary is on October 2nd. The UN also observes the day as the day as the International Day of Non-Violence While I have a lot of admiration for Mahatma Gandhi, there is a man I respect possibly even more. He is popularly known as […]

The recent story of Pen Farthing made me think and ask an uncomfortable question. Now you may be asking just who exactly is Pen Farthing. He is a former British Marine , who after  his stint was over, started a charity. The charity was based out of Afghanistan which by itself is not a bad

In the 2014 and 2019 elections every dimension of the news and social media was completely dominated by the BJP. The so-called mainstream print and television sector had already been or more or less bought out or intimidated into a hallelujah mode. As for Facebook and its subsidiaries Whatsapp and Instagram, one has only to

The vast majority of us ( and I include myself in this list ) are completely unaware of the role that sound – and silence – plays in our lives and mental well being. I was made aware of this recently by a BBC documentary about an App developed by some whizz kid in response

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