If it were not for the refusal of Shafique-ur-Rahman Barq, BSP member of Parliament, to join in with the singing of Vande Mataram, I might never have gone back to Bankim Chandra's Anandamath and rediscovered its many charms.Anandamath starts with a ...
The reading was at a sedate mela; literature was tucked in sideways, in between the food stalls and the sellers of heavy machinery. Jeet Thayil read a passage he had read often at literary festivals.It involved a rant from a character meditating on ...
Back in my day, which was of course when dinosaurs roamed the earth, Delhi University suffered from a serious case of envy.It had the St Stephen's versus Hindu battles, the dazzling brilliance of the Kirori Mal dramatic society, the nerdy appeal of ...
"You need to learn to think like a fox," writes Nate Silver, New York Times political forecaster. I went to Mr Silver to see what one of the leading statisticians of our times has to say about human bias; the fascinating subject of where our ...
How to write about the poor He knows he won't get very far if he thinks about them as "the poor", or as "them". The reader will sense the impenetrable barrier between him and his subjects, and an acute reader will feel the clunkiness of the dialogue ...
"Last winter we spent three months in India," John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in 1957. "Our life both in Calcutta and on our travels was mostly with Indians. It was a wonderful introduction to the endless fascinations and complexities of Indian ...
