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| It was not at all easy |
| The greatest maker of modern theatre |
| The news of Harold Pinter’s death came on Christmas Day. He was 78. It wasn’t unexpected. Cancer of oesophagus had been diagnosed eight years ago and the treatments plus several other illnesses had weakened him in the time since. Still, it was a sa... |
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| YEAR END CHILL |
| Public memory is myopic. It tends to see the recent, over the more distant, past. But sometimes, the events of the recent pas...|
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| A SHODDY TIME |
| Flung at an American president on his way out of office, it was a pair of shoes that seemed to belie the recession shadowing ...|
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| Need for a reality check |
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Mention ‘tribals’ and most people would conceive the picture of an impoverished people who survive by doing odd jobs or hunti... | Read.. |
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| The imagination and its strange fruit |
| What if the Indian army had marched into Tibet in 1962, for instance, instead of fleeing helter-skelter into Assam, or Saddam Hussein given the Americans a bloody nose in 2003... |
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| Spinning the wheel |
| ….but to say so at the time would have drawn insults ranging from ‘fantasist’ to ‘lunatic’, enquiries would have poured forth as to what substances, legal or illegal, this wri... |
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| Bordering on distress |
| If Kasab and his comrades hadn’t attacked Bombay, Pakistan would have escaped the trauma brought on by India’s vicious response. President Zardari wouldn’t have had to suffer ... |
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| Changed version |
| What if Lal Bahadur Shastri had not died unexpectedly of a heart attack in Tashkent in January 1966? When he was named prime minister in succession to Jawaharlal Nehru, most p... |
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Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
— GEORGE ORWELL
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