Shortly before India began its economic reforms in the early-1990s, Shashi Tharoor, a former junior foreign minister, published The Great Indian Novel, a somewhat immodestly named…
Browsing: Columns
The comment of the week: Commonwealth Games Organising Committee Secretary General Lalit Bhanot saying in all seriousness that foreign standards of cleanliness may be different from…
As the all-party delegation heads to Srinagar today to try and find a meeting ground for dialogue, they will be mindful of an old aphorism of…
Responding to Malthusian theories about population growth, the Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle coined the term ‘the dismal science’ to denote the newly emerging discipline of economists.…
There is a curious phenomenon that has taken shape in sections of the Pakistani press in the past 3-4 days. At least two TV networks, Express…
As the Prime Minister inspected Commonwealth Games sites on Sunday and Sheila Dixit extended the deadline for the venues yet another time, the last-gasp dash to…
“If I were a man of money, I would be in a different profession.” This was French President Nicolas Sarkozy in a TV interview last month…
In 1991, jewellery tycoon Gerald Ratner, who successfully turned his family jewellery business into billion-dollar public enterprise, made a speech where he called his products “total…
A year or so ago a respected social scientist told me a telling account of his meeting with a Pakistani general and his wife at a…
Long before he became a politician, Suresh Kalmadi was an Air Force pilot. Among his favourite memories, he has said in the past, was landing planes…