Don’t India’s politicians get it? The significance of the Jessica Lall case goes much beyond the fact that a young girl was murdered and that her killer was finally convicted.

The true significance of the case is that it symboli Read more

Life can sometimes come full circle. On that fateful night in 1984 when the Indian Army seized control of the Golden Temple, I was part of a tiny minority who regarded the operation as a disaster. Read more

Do you sometimes feel that intellectuals and experts like complicating issues needlessly so that lay people like you and me are not only excluded from the discussion but are also left hopelessly confused?

Do you wonder why so many activists and self-proclaimed scholars take the positions of lay people and then caricature them so that they can construct men of straw to attack? Read more

Now that the Bombay/ Mumbai controversy has returned to the headlines, thanks to the Maharashtra elections, this may be a good time to examine the whole issue of the naming and renaming of places. Read more

I don’t really blame Air India’s pilots for last week’s strike. I don’t blame the civil aviation ministry. I don’t blame Praful Patel. And I don’t even blame the Air India management which tried to slash the remuneration paid to pilots. Read more

Enough has been said and written about Shashi Tharoor and the austerity drive: why does he use terms like cattle class? Why does he need privacy in a deluxe hotel? Who is the holy cow? Etc.

But while I’m mostly on Tharoor’s side on this one, the contretemps seems to me to be one more reminder of how difficult it is for successful professionals to fit into the Indian political mainstream. They usually don’t understand the system, they rarely master its idiom, and most times, the system unites to repel them. Read more

Every time anybody talks about politicians and austerity, I’m always reminded of Sarojini Naidu’s famous remark about how much it cost to keep Mahatma Gandhi in poverty. Naidu meant that if the Mahatma intended to travel by third class in a train, then a whole bogey had to be cleared so that he could be secure. The symbolism of third-class travel was powerful and effective but the cost was rather more stupendous than the Congress was willing to let on. Read more

Who would have thought it? Over two weeks ago, when I left the country, the BJP was busy explaining to the world why it had expelled Jaswant Singh, one of its most senior leaders for either praising M A Jinnah (this argument was quickly junked when people asked why L.K. Advani had not been thrown out five years ago, in that case) or for committing the cardinal sin of daring to be critical of a Congress leader who had banned the RSS and prosecuted Hindutva icon Veer Savarkar for the murder of Mahatma Gandhi. Read more

Here is a hypothetical question. You are the head of a counter-terrorist force in Bombay. It is 26/11. Terrorists are spreading havoc in the city. You don’t know how many of them there are or what they are planning. But thanks to the sacrifices of a few brave policemen, Ajmal Kasab arrives in your custody. Read more