Yearning for a Kanhaiya?
Kanhaiya’s brilliant oratoricalper fo r mance has catapult ed him into the sta tus of a hero, even for those who don’t quite agree with him ideologically.There are predictions of a future in politics...
View ArticleOne step at a time
Senior RSS leader Dattatreya Hosabale issued a statement about the need to decriminalise homosexuality and then appeared to do a U-turn by calling it not a criminal but a socially immoral act that...
View ArticleA question of consent
Maneka’s Gandhi’s recent statement to the effect that the concept of marital rape could not be suitably applied in the Indian context due to its unique cultural context has expectedly raised a storm of...
View ArticleImprisoned by textbooks?
My neighbor in the aircraft is ploughing determinedly through a fat textbook with title, which has a title that is both simple and quite definitive- Chemistry. As is quite normal with textbooks, this...
View ArticleThe builder flat: Modernity without content?
Across the country, a new kind of habitat is being created. As the city spills over from its original boundaries, and moves skywards, more and more Indians are coming to terms with the idea of...
View ArticleDr Ambedkar and the market for icons
The extraordinary attempts made by political parties to claim Dr Ambedkar as one of their own has received much comment. One would have understood this phenomenon taking place in the immediate...
View ArticleAn epidemic of arbitrariness?
Those who grew up in India in the seventies and eighties would be familiar with Mandrake the Magician. Along with Phantom, he fought a lonely battle against evil, before the other caped superheroes...
View ArticleOf love and hate in Pakistan
What makes an event news? This somewhat unoriginal question came into sharp focus last week for me on my first trip to Pakistan. One of the co-speakers at a marketing conference I was speaking at...
View ArticleA nation disconnected?
In this day and age, what explains the electoral pull of a device like prohibition? Kerala announced it, Nitish Kumar followed, and Tamil Nadu is next on the list. Why would such a heavy-handed measure...
View ArticleThe coming of the hot democracy
When a rigorous democratic process throws up someone like Donald Trump as one of the two people likely to become the most powerful person in the world, it is natural to take another look at...
View ArticleThe BJP: A question of ambition?
What does one make of the recent Assembly election results? Much has already been said- that the BJP is now clearly and unambiguously a national party. That the Congress is on life support and might...
View ArticleIn the name of the family
The Congress has lost again, it once again needs to ‘introspect’, and once again the family is not to blame. Increasingly, it is becoming difficult to care and perhaps after the 2019 elections there...
View ArticleOutrage as fodder for commentary?
The most significant takeaway from the Tanmay Bhat issue is that one needs to write an article about it. There seems to be no way out of it. There have been many laments about the...
View ArticleThe silence of our heroes
Do people revered as heroes in any culture have a moral responsibility to speak up for larger issues and take strong political stances? The question has come to the forefront in the wake of the...
View ArticleThe language of names?
We are born wriggling factories of waste, hairless, featureless with little by way of ability or personality, communicating in binary mode- either bawling or mercifully quiet. Around this time, we are...
View ArticleThe market for simplicity
It is telling that the deeply entangled issue of extricating Britain from the EU was decided on the basis of a referendum. Yes or No. In or Out. It is perhaps even more telling that...
View ArticleThe terrorism franchise
Wave after wave of terrorism seems to be getting unleashed on the world at a pace that is getting difficult to keep up with. This piece was first conceived when Omar Mateen slaughtered so many...
View ArticleSearch for decisiveness at the heart of a leader’s mass appeal
The recent cabinet reshuffle has been quite well received, by and large. While the new inclusions have not attracted much comment, the shuffling around of key ministers is what has stirred the...
View ArticleShame as social instrument?
The use of public humiliation as an instrument of social control can take on some horrible forms. Being paraded on a donkey, being tonsured, being stripped naked and having one’s face blackened- these...
View ArticleThe instinct trap?
The practice of politics is often understood as being about painstaking calculation, labored alliance building and the clever use of power to grant and withhold favours in order to extract advantage....
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