Orders from HQ
Forget a week being a long time in politics, in India it can take just a few hours for a zero to become a hero and vice versa. On...
Try a little kindness
Has Gujarat really moved on ten years after the terrible violence of 2002? The answer depends on who the question is asked to. Chief minister Narendra Modi, for example,...
Has Gujarat been able to bury the ghost of Godhra?
Ten years can be a lifetime in today’s here-and-now world. Ten years after the Gujarat violence, the state claims to have moved on. Relative peace and the engine of...
Let’s play it straight
Here’s a story that perhaps best exemplifies how far Indian cricket has travelled. In the mid-1950s, India was playing New Zealand. At the time the players were paid a...
Face the nation
On the face of it, a Narendra Modi’s politics is as different from Mayawati’s as a Gujarati dhokla is from a Lucknowi seekh kebab. One is a Hindutva icon,...
Running out of steam
Lalu Prasad is the Pied Piper of Patna. One of the more special moments in journalism was travelling with the RJD chief to Pakistan in 2003. Indo-Pak relations were...
Back to square one
Indo-Pak cricket, like diplomatic relations between the two countries, suffers from schizophrenia. Rewind to January 1999 when a Chennai crowd gave a standing ovation to Wasim Akram’s men after...
Actions tweet louder
If the twitterati were India’s voting class, then Shashi Tharoor would be the Supreme Leader. A few weeks ago, when Tharoor’s tweet on the government’s visa policies generated much...
Drowning things out
Having grown up in the megalopolis, I have an obvious emotional attachment to Mumbai. Which is why when at a studio discussion this week, when a panelist referred to...