AS XI CELEBRATES MAO, BE PREPARED FOR MORE WUHANS, GALWANS

June 26, 2021

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is all set to celebrate its 100th anniversary on 1 July. Chinese President and CCP general secretary Xi Jinping is leaving no stone unturned to make it an “epochal event”, with the twin objectives of putting China at the top of the global order, besides...

IMRAN IS JUST A SYMPTOM, REAL PROBLEM IS THE IDEA OF PAKISTAN

June 22, 2021

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan is a perfect manifestation of what’s wrong with his country today. A leader who was in his youth known as much for his cricketing exploits on field as for off-the-field glamorous lifestyle, is today the brand ambassador of the Taliban. Last year, he infamously called...

We Indians are a rebellious race, so dharma works for us: Amish

January 15, 2021

In their new book, Dharma: Decoding the Epics for a Meaningful Life, Amish and Bhavna Roy explore the idea of dharma and its interplay with karma, love and sacrifice. The authors explain how dharma lets us make our own choices and live with the consequences, adding that “dharmic religions treat...

SHASHI THAROOR GETS IT WRONG, AGAIN

December 18, 2020

The Battle of Belonging Shashi Tharoor Aleph, Rs 799 At the risk of generalising his otherwise vast corpus of academic work, anybody reading Shashi Tharoor would say that he invariably makes a wonderful edifice of arguments to begin with, but often ends up destroying the superstructure of ideas when the...

BJP’S ORIGINAL JODI NO. 1

December 4, 2020

From the time of Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, post-Independence Indian politics has mostly been about jugalbandi. Even during the turbulent 1970s, there was the mother-son jodi of Mrs Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi ruling the corridors of power, often imperiously. However, it was in the era of coalitions, since the mid-1990s—post...

PRINCELY STATES AND BRITAIN’S DIABOLICAL DESIGN TO ‘KEEP A BIT OF INDIA’

November 13, 2020

Nirad C. Chaudhuri, in the mid-1960s, made a scathing attack in his book Continent of Circe, on Indian writers for seeing “their country and society in the way Englishmen and Americans do and write about India in the jargon of the same masters”. More than 55 years have passed, but these...

WHY ARUN SHOURIE WANTS YOU TO PREPARE FOR DEATH

November 6, 2020

There was a time when Arun Shourie would write and invariably an avalanche-like situation would erupt in the country’s establishment, both political as well as academic. In his typical fact-based analysis, with a tinge of humour and sarcasm, and often Urdu and Hindi couplets, he would be a single-man army...

SEARCHING FOR A HERO LOST IN TRANSLATION

October 30, 2020

Knowing Bibek Debroy and his voracious translation work from Sanskrit into English, this book seems an obvious culmination. Manmatha Nath Dutt, after all, was one stellar translator whom Debroy must have encountered almost every time he would have initiated a new project. It would have bewitched him to find this...

Modi never parried questions, Sanjeev Bhat’s claims untenable: 2002 probe chief

October 27, 2020

Recalling the 2002 post-Godhra riots in Gujarat, the chief of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) formed to investigate the violence, R.K. Raghavan, has revealed in his memoirs A Road Well Travelled that he was under immense pressure and there were “efforts to dislodge” him from the SIT because he “was...

The real Modi and the fallacy of liberalism

October 2, 2020

Three years ago, Lord Meghnad Desai, in a meeting with this writer, recalled an interesting incident of December 2007, soon after the Gujarat Assembly election results. Lord Meghnad was asked on live television to analyse then Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s electoral victory. Pat came the reply: “Modi is the next...