Dil Maange More
We are so used to parliament not functioning, that when it does debate, we suddenly wake up to the latent skills of our MPs (yes, there is much....
‘Intolerance’ and Khans
In his autobiography, the original Hindi film superstar Dilip Kumar writes of how he got his screen name. It was the Bombay Talkies owner Devika Rani who told him,...
‘Intolerance’ and Khans
In his autobiography, the original Hindi film superstar Dilip Kumar writes of how he got his screen name. It was the Bombay Talkies owner Devika Rani who told him,...
The Great Indian Election: Do elections change a country?
The former British prime minister Harold Wilson once said a week is along time in politics. He was probably wrong.: In India, a weekend is enough as I have...
Nehru, Ambedkar’s legacies shadowed by political partisanship
In 2012, we did a television show to identify the greatest Indian after Mahatma Gandhi (post 1947). The winner by some distance was Babasaheb Ambedkar; Jawaharlal Nehru just about...
Nehru, Ambedkar’s legacies shadowed by political partisanship
In 2012, we did a television show to identify the greatest Indian after Mahatma Gandhi (post 1947). The winner by some distance was Babasaheb Ambedkar; Jawaharlal Nehru just about...
The Bihar Wave: My takeaways
A) Elections are always about arithmetic, occasionally about chemistry. 2015 Bihar has been about a bit of both: the caste arithmetic of the...
Jai Khanistan
Long before Sharukh Khan, there was the original post Independence superstar: Dilip Kumar, or rather Yusuf Khan. There are two stories as to why Yusuf became Dilipsaab. The first...
Bihar 10 takeaways
After almost a week of criss crossing Bihar, the big question remains: who is winning the battle for one of the country’s most politically significant states? So, here are...
Lalu-Nitish joshi: twist in a Bihar tale
There is a wonderfully poignant story, possibly apocryphal, about the original Hindi cinema ‘phenomenon’ Rajesh Khanna that reveals the limits of superstardom. During his peak years, Khanna would hold...