A Tortured Beauty
You return from the Kashmir valley with a sense of overwhelming melancholia: it is a beautiful but tortured land. What should have been the Switzerland of the sub-continent is...
Game is to hide: Srinivasan symbolic of deeper rot
Prime time news television thrives on the idea of a daily enemy, someone who can be court-martialled every night and then pronounced guilty by the news anchor playing the...
Cricket can kill
The tragic death of Phil Hughes on a cricket field has revived memories of another day. My late father tells me the story of the mood in the Indian...
26/11: lest we forget
Every 26/11, I offer a silent prayer for the victims of the Mumbai terror attack. Like so many south Mumbaikars, I felt directly connected to the act of terror....
Murlibhai, my friend.
I suddenly felt 'old' this morning when at 5 am I got an sms saying Murli Deora had passed away. Murlibhai was the first politician I became a...
Godmen or Conmen?
Here's an honest confession: I hadn't heard of Rampal till the last few days. This is partly due to ignorance, partly because I do remain deeply sceptical of ordinary...
Life with Didi
Interviewing some politicians can be injurious to health at times. Over the years, I have had the good fortune of interviewing almost all the country's top netas. Each one...
Identity is not always destiny
A simple tweet, all of 140 characters, can be hazardous to one’s health as I have discovered to my cost yet again. Last Sunday, as Narendra Modi went in...
Modi and me
My 26-year career in journalism has parallelled the journey of two individuals who have achieved iconic status. The first front page article I got a byline for was Sachin...
Rahul Gandhi has to lead his troops
Daughters can be unusually prescient: Taking a first look at my book, 2014: The Election that Changed India, she asked why the cover had pictures of both Narendra Modi...