Columns

Sometime back the Union Minister for Labour and Employment, Shobha Karandjale, blamed the spread of education in the country for the high unemployment rate: we have far too many graduates, she added, in case you missed it the first time. This immediately caused a huge uproar on social media and various liberal groups, with someone […]

At the height of the Roman empire, all roads led to, and from, Rome. In Britannia alone – a province conquered in 43 AD and held for 400 years – the Roman legions built about 8,000 miles of roads. The historian Plutarch records that these roads ran ‘perfectly straight through the countryside’. Remnants of them

Marx missed the full picture when he described religion as an opiate of the masses. so did George Carlin when he claimed that God was a fiction. For today Neo-Capitalism and right-wing fundamentalism have assigned God a new role and turned Him into an FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Good): far from being an opiate He

“There’s a new Sheriff in town,” was what the newly minted TD Vance, Vice President of the USA, informed Europe in his typical hillbilly way on his first visit there. He was, presumably, referring to Trump and not to the federal marshal, Musk, who appears to be riding shotgun for the former as the American

The West and Russia are two cyclops who have never been able to see eye to eye. Over centuries, they have grown into giants with ambitions beyond their borders and power beyond their dreams. For the rest of the world, they are a nightmare. The present conflict in and over Ukraine is more than a

Unlike our Prime Minister or Mr. Narayan Murthy, I do not labour for 18 hours a day; in fact, I don’t labour at all- having toiled for 35 years I have now left it to others to clear out the mess I’ve created during that period. But this doesn’t mean I don’t put in many

Himachal’s beautiful and priceless rivers are facing a new threat in their ongoing battle against “development”. First it was the roads hacked out in their valleys, dumping tens of millions of tonnes of earth and debris into their waters, constricting their flows and devastating aquatic life. Then came the hydel projects, extinguishing whatever little aquatic

Lahore dozes in the summer. In spring, it comes alive with LitFests. The Faiz Festival occupied last weekend; the Lahore LitFest the next. In between, there has been the Horse & Cattle Show in the Fortress Stadium. Once the showcase for Punjab’s agricultural livestock and agro-produce, it has been revived as a showpiece by the

A long, long time ago when people still read books and were not educated exclusively by Whatsapp forwards or Tik-Tok reels, Nirad Choudhry, the last Englishman in India, claimed in his book of the same name that India was a continent of Circe, where humans were turned into beasts. Now, 70 years later, he has