At a time when much of the world’s media is battling a financial crisis, one inscrutable benefactor looms large. The irony, of course, is that this is the country that created the current crisis...

In the late 80s, I got to know a lawyer in London. A British Gujarati born in East Africa, R, in his early 30s then, was quietly making a name for himself in the United Kingdom’s legal and civil...

An acquaintance came to me a few weeks ago with the rough draft of a letter about free speech and asked me to sign. I declined, in part because it denounced ‘cancel culture’. As I wrote in...

American visas were not outsourced in 1964. The consulate issued them. It was a formality in my case since I was going on an invitation from Henry Kissinger’s Harvard international seminar. All ...

July is the perfect month to watch Loving Vincent. Three days from now, on July 27 — but 130 years ago — Vincent van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a Lefaucheux revolver. There w...

It is entirely possible that had the Bharatiya Janata Party not succeeded in toppling the Kamal Nath-led Congress government in Madhya Pradesh in the week prior to the Covid-19 lockdown in March, the ...

The most amazing thing, the wise hero of the epic had said, is that creatures die every day, yet all wish to live forever. Going a step further, he might have said that they believe, too, that the ine...

As speculated last month, the parallel run of Covid-19 and economic reopening could be non-linear and far more unpredictable than that in a full-lockdown scenario. Economic developments since then bea...

Last month, I wrote in these columns on the need to decongest our prisons in our Covid-19 times. And I pointed to the number of undertrial prisoners in our prisons with whose monitored and urgent rele...

The uproar over fast-tracking a Covid-19 vaccine exposes a deepening malaise in India’s knowledge order. Less momentous examples have become endemic to our scholarship and research. We are growi...