The banning of the film Da Vinci Code is irrationalism of an extreme kind, which panders to fundamentalism in one community and puts liberals in the other on the defensive.
Of Life, Letters and Politics
The communists may have come back to power in West Bengal but some still think they have failed to change with the times. The feeling is that Buddhadeb has his economics right but has to carry a...
The "slip-ups" witnessed during Chinese president Hu Jintaoâ??s recent visit to the US constituted more than mere diplomatic faux pas; they were unintentionally or otherwise, an admission of US...
M S Golwalkar, whose birth centenary the RSS observes this year, was the RSS chief who gave shape and imparted a definitive ideology to the organisation. Golwalkar's position on "Hindu consolidation...
The attack on a newspaper whose only "crime" was to respond with silence during the occasion of "Shivaji jayanti" portends the rise of a new kind of cultural chauvinism.
In the short history of Indian democracy, "familocracy" has long established precedents. But familocracy, as revealed by the Karnataka crisis, sparked off by moves made by Kumaraswamy, Deve Gowda's...
A play in a local language is pulled off stage as it ostensibly offends religious sentiments. This incident finds no mention in the national press or in the English language dailies. On the other...
By dispensing with the celebrations associated with November 7, Russian president Vladimir Putin is seeking to define a new history for his country. But his action involves the sweeping erasure of a...
Over the years, a culture of forgetfulness has come to dominate the general understanding of politics in our country, where the immediate past is forgotten to accommodate short-term compromises...
Telling the truth, with a capital 'T' is in fashion - be it between the coach and captain of the Indian cricket team, or by the defence minister about relations with China or prime minister Manmohan...
It is no surprise that once again there is no consensus on the question of women's reservation in Parliament. Political parties seem divided on the mode and the nature of reservation. But that such...
There is probably no better word than 'prashasti', usually a long poem intended as a work of praise and veneration for a king or patron, to refer to the prime minister's exercise in rewriting of...
Ayodhya and London tell us that there are two kinds of terrorism. For want of any scientific descriptive terminology, we have to call them 'their' terrorism and 'our' terrorism. Here the 'we' is as...
Advani?s remarks on Jinnah were not praise for a ?secularist? leader of Pakistan but part of a new Savarkarite discourse on India.
Political inheritance in India has its own peculiar logic that appears to go against democracy's accepted tenets of functioning.
