With just under a year to go to the Lok Sabha polls, I shudder to think at the mish-mash India is faced with if neither the Congress nor the BJP were to get a majority – or at least emerge as the single largest party in the Lok Sabha. Read more

As I was growing up, I had acquired a friend who had desperately wanted to be a spy. Brought up seeing James Bond films and reading John Le Carre books, he had believed he could do much for the country and serve the people well as an intelligence officer in one of the various agencies in India. Read more

I served on the advisory council of the Censor Board for a term in the mid-2000s and I must say the experience was very interesting. Read more

Last week I heard with interest Rahul Gandhi, as the newly appointed vice president of his party, call for the identification of 40 to 50 people in the Congress in each state who could be leaders -potential chief ministers and prime ministers. Read more

As Bal Thackeray’s birth anniversary approaches (January 23), I wonder where the Shiv Sena supremo’s legacy has disappeared barely two months after his passing (on Nov 17, 2012). Read more

It says much about us, in the media, that not a single newspaper, television channel or news agency, had the faintest clue that the UPA 2 government was preparing to hang 26/11 terrorist Ajmal Kasab on November 21, five days before the fourth anniversary of the terror attack. Read more

Some years ago I wrote this story about Giani Zail Singh in my column ‘anandan ON WEDNESDAY’ which appears in the print edition of the newspaper every, well, Wednesday. I guess it bears repeating in another context. Zail Singh had become President of India just as I started off as a rookie in journalism and all I had heard about him were wise cracks about his bumbling ways. Read more

A friend of mine sent me an e-mail the last time around when the government had hiked petrol and diesel prices in the country. I have updated the fuel prices in his figures to today’s numbers but have left the earlier figures of other products untouched: they still, by far, overtake petrol prices by huge measures even today. Read more

When Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan accused his Bihar counterpart, Nitish Kumar, of playing cheap political games, he was not far wrong. Read more

I was sitting in the middle of the road, atop my brand new leaf-green VIP suitcase, just outside the gates of the Indian Airlines office in Tezpur, where the airlines bus had deposited me just a few minutes ago, and not knowing where to go from there when I spotted a few men carrying daos and some old-fashioned bows and arrows making their way towards me. Read more