Last week, the government released a set of statistics that have since caused much anxiety over where the Indian economy is headed to. Read more

Census details for Delhi are out. From car-owning households to phone connections and Internet access, the city-state has seen all such “indicators of development” register robust growth between 2001 and 2011. And that is not surprising as everything has worked for Delhi to gain more than most other parts of country from India’s sweeping economic transformation over the past two decade. Read more

Last week, I was in Kolkata — my second visit since the state of Bengal embraced Parivartan in a historic election last May that ended 34 years of Left rule with a sweeping mandate for Mamata Banerjee. Read more

As the computer was taking time to open my bank account details, the customer care executive chose to chat up. “So you are from Orissa,” he guessed, and that’s not a difficult guess to make — mine is a surname that’s not common to any other state. “There are lots of Maoists there,” he said, as if there was no other description. Well, there has never been a description that has made me feel good about my state. Read more

I am not a big fan of cricket. I stopped following test cricket when I was in college — in the late 80s. The last one-dayer I watched was probably sometime in 2003 or 2004. Read more

One way of looking at the latest poverty estimates from the government is that the number of poor saw the biggest drop, falling by more than 7 percentage points between 2004-05 and 2009-10. Read more

On Tuesday, Uttar Pradesh saw a new sonrise — Samajwadi party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav’s son Akhilesh scripting a new chapter in the politics of India’s most populous state. Read more

Several years ago, I vowed not to fly Air India after the crew on a flight to Hong Kong refused to replace a dirty blanket. “We don’t have spare blankets. You can register a complaint if you want,” said the flight attendant — rude and curt — even before I could switch to a complaining tone. Read more

My job takes me to Lucknow every now and then. In the past six months, I have been there thrice. And on each successive visit, I have seen the number of hoardings and billboards of Mayawati grow. Read more

If you are a supporter of Anna Hazare and you are in the market to buy a house in Delhi, don’t complain if you have to spend twice or three times more on registering your property. Read more