Cheap thrills come at a price and it must have run into crores. How else can you get half a million clerics to oppose India’s sanitized national song, Vande Mataram? Read more

I had no consternation that, as one of the many hosts and facilitators of the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit, I would be attending to guests at a gala dinner where President George W. Bush would be the star attraction.

Here was a man who I think had wrecked much of the Muslim world. Read more

There is a thing or two about the government’s approach towards Muslims that is worrisome. One of them is that the government sometimes takes Muslims too seriously!

Take for instance the UPA government’s somewhat anxious efforts to streamline madrassa education, a system of education which is not just largely informal but its curriculum is also often viewed as irrelevant. Read more

If Muslim-perpetrated terror creates Islamophobia; smart counter-insurgency should be able to purge it (by eliminating terrorism). Abusive counter-terrorism on the other hand fuels more terror and, therefore, more Islamophobia. Muslims clearly have more at stake in the war on terror than others do. Read more

History is bu-ran-ji in Assamese, the only word from the now-extinct Tai tribal language of the Ahom people — who ruled Assam’s Brahmaputra valley between the 13th and 18th century — to have survived. Assamese replaced Tai in the early 19th century.
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I

Sometimes I see
What we can be:
A billion-plus family Read more

Do what you will, this world’s a fiction and is made up of contradiction. William Blake, English Poet.

Great cities are invariably those that stand on ruins of history — like Delhi. A city without history may have opulence and glistening high-rises but will lack a soul. Read more

Stating the obvious and explaining what needs no explanation are not always avoidable. Nor can we escape familiarity, though it may only breed contempt. This is especially true of Hindu-Muslim relations in India, largely defined by differences. A correction of perception one has of the other has to be emphasized; but the more this is attempted, the more it results in the two communities going round in circles again. Read more

Once upon a time, there was a Muslim who loved his ham and pork; seldom prayed; had raven hair and was a dandy as a movie star; took his daughter to theatres, who quoted her father as ridiculing Muslims, saying, ‘a Muslim with Rs 10 will buy a headscarf and eat biryani, but a Hindu will save it’; but who ultimately settled for a Muslim nation. Read more

What would Tagore have made — had he been alive — of Samuel P. Huntington’s best-selling clash-of-civilizations case? Would he have panned it as preposterous? Or refuted it?

Rabindranath Tagore would proudly describe his Bengali Hindu family as a “confluence of three cultures: Hindu, Mohammedan, and British”. [The Religion of Man; London: Allen and Unwin, 1930]. Read more