Sada Vasco 25th February 2014 Dear Mr.Shankhwalkar, I received a copy of your note, late last night curtailing my privileges – or are they rights? – to receive weekly visits from my family, make STD calls and requisition items from the jail canteen. The cause of this as indicated by your note was “for using [...]
Gujarat Government alleges that, on 27th February 2002, the fire which caused the tragic death of 58 passengers in the S6 coach of the ill-fated Sabarmati Express was started from inside by pouring over 120 litres of petrol and setting it on fire as part of a pre-planned conspiracy. However the evidence on record completely [...]
Somewhere on the Penguin India website, between the events calendar and the Facebook and Twitter links is a box advertising merchandise. You can click to buy key chains, luggage tags, notebooks, diaries, mugs, cloth bags and postcards. The merchandise is exclusive to Penguin and designed to resemble Penguin books with the familiar logo and its [...]
Dear Condor and Frankfurt Airport Authority, Since I couldn’t take the flight to Havana from Frankfurt because of the industrial strike in Germany on Feb. 21, and Condor staff wasn’t there to tell me anything in person or on the phone about re-booking, please let me know if you will reimburse my ticket money to [...]
In 1984, soon after I returned from Harvard, I undertook a long journey through Bihar and eastern UP to understand what the situation there was and why? I was actively encouraged to do so by the late Chandrasekhar, who while belonging to UP in a technical sense was a Bihari by heart. When I completed [...]
Ham Paanch Hamare Pachis (We five, Our twenty five), is a sneering reference to the supposed Muslim attitude to family planning, and was well used by Narendra Modi in his successful re-election campaign in 2003. It does seem that many Hindus find the higher Muslim population growth rate threatening. Because of higher birthrates, the percentage [...]
The media surveys have always troubled me with skepticism and disbelief, partly because I am not particularly good at arithmetic, which is why I had to give up studying science and turn to the study of English Literature. To this day numbers give me jitters what to talk of graphs and percentages and therefore I [...]
The new police commissioner of Mumbai, Rakesh Maria, is easily the city’s most controversial cop. But going by newspaper reports of his appointment, you wouldn’t know it. Only the Indian Express and The Hindu mentioned a few of the controversies related to him. The most damning indictment of Maria came after the November 26, 2008 [...]
Nearly 9,200 youth have been booked for stone pelting and “waging war against the state” in Kashmir since 2009 and only 1800 persons have been granted amnesty by the government so far. “1733 cases of stone pelting and waging war against the state have been registered against 9,166 youth in Kashmir from January 2009 to [...]
One way or another, the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi continues to haunt the nation, a classic example of what the Czech novelist Milan Kundera described as a struggle of memory against forgetting. Those who are on the side of memory have a new weapon now in journalist Manoj Mitta’s recently released book, The Fiction of [...]
