Just before the 2009 Lok Sabha election, Prakash Karat, still strutting with the swagger of the Left’s largest ever contingent in Parliament, declared before an election…
Year: 2011
India and China are doing better at reaching understanding on the ocean waves than the air waves. While their navies are talking to each other, their…
One of the more interesting and revealing comments about the Osama killing this week came from a gushing academic at the French Institute of Foreign Relations…
When the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III died in 1250 without an agreed successor, his empire went into turmoil. Among the first administrative casualties of the…
South American poet Jorges Luis Borges writes in his poem ‘Happiness’ (La Dicha) that “everything happens for the first time”. “Whosoever embraces a woman is Adam,”…
Revolution is always an easy word to bandy around. Sometimes too easy, and when it suits your ratings, it is easier still. The tricolour is flying…
Six years after India first won the cricket World Cup in 1983, the sociologist Ashis Nandy famously wrote, “Cricket is an Indian game, accidentally invented by…
The last time the British and French indulged together in a military adventure in the Middle East, they were humiliated and their noses rubbed in the…
It is in the nature of Opposition parties to be agitational, to be constantly in campaign mode. The pursuit of power demands it but there is…
At a time when the Army is being accused of a gender bias in denying permanent commissions to women officers, two stories have symbolised the debate…