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  • May
    15

    Perception & prejudice

    If you thought religious bigotry was an exclusively South Asian phenomenon, you should come to supposedly pragmatic Southeast Asia,

  • Apr
    30

    Fascism on a plate

    The controversy over beef — more social and political than religious — recalls a lunch in a chinese restaurant in Dhaka hosted by a distinguished Bangladeshi bureaucrat.

  • Apr
    17

    Primary concerns

    The Supreme court’s support for the Right of children to Free and compulsory Education Act 2009, or Right to Education

  • Apr
    03

    Sir, I refuse to retire

    Old soldiers never die, but unlike the lines of the ballad, they don’t just fade away either.

  • Mar
    20

    Greater than the sum of its parts

    An attempt is being made to project the Dinesh Trivedi controversy as a crisis in Centre-states relations. It’s nothing of the kind.

  • Mar
    06

    Mister or Miss?

    The five-column headline, “Tibetan poetess under house arrest”, in a leading Indian newspaper surprised me.

  • Feb
    21

    Secular-bashing in multi-faith Britain

    The secular-bashing sounds Indian — and saffron Indian at that — rather than British.

  • Feb
    07

    The Malta metaphor

    Mario Mifsud, a Maltese travel agent in Valletta, is a devout Roman Catholic who spent a couple of months in Kolkata

  • Jan
    24

    India: The (in)human condition

    If seeing homeless men crouched in doorways through the long nights of London’s bitter cold fills one with horror, reading of 5.5 million people

  • Dec
    27

    Brains down the drain

    Just after joining the Statesman in London in 1960, I wrote an article on the many young Indians who were forced to stay on in Britain