A French friend of mine has just sold her apartment in one of the most central and ‘happening’ areas of Paris and moved to the smaller city of Lyon in the centre of France. Within an hour’s driv...

Among the most knowledgeable scholars of Indian history and politics is the Delhi-based lawyer, Anil Nauriya. I have been deeply educated by his essays, these researched and written in between his wor...

“In a succession of thousands of years,/ In years of poverty and disaster,/ What existed was not a person,/ But countless disfigured cripples.One spent his whole life as a cobbler/ Formed no judgeme...

Why are the masterpieces of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael called Renaissance art? If ‘renaissance’ stands for modern, what is modern about these works of art? One possibility is that...

The prehistoric Homo sapiens spread out from their source to all continents, braving unimaginable odds, and created the possibility of humans becoming avant-garde in the process of the evolution of Li...

A recent tweet from the Congress leader and former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Kamal Nath, runs thus: “It is really praiseworthy that Muslim community persons along with the old woman’s two ...

On Christmas in 1977, a friend in London presented me with a copy of a quirky paperback, Big Red Joke Book, which has since become a collector’s item but which, I regret to say, I have since misplac...

Every election in a democracy leads to heightened passions and exaggerated displays of partisanship. Regardless of the eventual outcome, a healthy contest necessarily involves a belief in all sides of...

Several years ago, in a rural recess of Bihar where I come from, a girl, barely ten, woke up one morning and slipped out into the open to relieve herself. Returning, she came upon a crop of spinach an...

It is the season of Saccharum spontaneum. Kaashphul — Saccharum spontaneum is its scientific name — native to the subcontinent, is the harbinger of autumn and the beloved Goddess in the Bengali mi...