No one predicted in 1989 that when a large East German crowd would turn up at the Berlin Wall, nervous border guards, who would have shot…
Year: 2011
It must count as one of the most memorable messages ever to finish a war. As he entered Dhaka on the morning of 16 December 1971,…
The best way to describe the current state of the Manmohan Singh government is the way the journalist Martin Johnson analysed the England cricket team of…
In 1996, when there were still considerable fears about the future of economic reform and western investors were flocking to management gurus to brush up on…
In October 2009, Open magazine ran a cover story with the title ‘Will the Congress rule for the next 20 years?’ The Congress had just won…
A couple of days ago, a prominent TV anchor, not associated with the Anna protest coverage, posted sardonically on his Facebook wall that he wanted to…
Back in the 1970s, Willie Whitelow, who later became Margaret Thatcher’s deputy prime minister, famously responded to a crisis in the then Labour government by tut-tutting…
For television, the 1990s began with a worried bureaucrat in the ministry of information and broadcasting submitting a file to his minister on how to stop…
In the foyer of the magnificent Musee D’Orsay in Paris hangs a telling painting by the nineteenth century French artist Thomas Couture. Titled ‘The Romans during…
Absurdness comes in various forms. In the stratified levels of the uniformed bureaucracy it seems to come in the form of a birth day, or more…
