In a short essay that I have returned to again and again to reaffirm to myself the recurrent inadequacy of language in conveying the bizarre hyper-reality of the world around us, Salman Rushdie wrote:...

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The good news for Narendra Modi just refuses to ebb, it oozes like the viscous sweetness of summer fruit. May 23 was breathtaking beyond expectation, a second-term endorsement that rendered the parlia...

There came a moment in my recent interaction with the chief of the army staff, Bipin Rawat, whose implications are unsettling enough to require remark. I ventured to get his sense of the situation in ...

“Mobs smash, loot and burn”“Fires and bomb wreck town...”“Furniture and goods flung from homes and shops...”“Bands rove... plunderers trail wreckers... Police stand idle...”Familiar he...

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...

A fair lot has happened in the six months since India’s crown was sundered, downgraded and hammered into a prison-house sans parallel. Today is six months since the hobnailed silencing of Jammu and ...

One of his key tenets of leadership Nelson Mandela had grasped from the pastoral practices of his ancestry. He used to call it leading from behind, just like herders of the African bush would daily le...

The year that has begun might well turn out to be the most momentous in the memory of our lives, or in the memory of the lives of most of us. How many of us are still around, after all, who were alive...

The smallest geographies can often conjure large, often lingering, patterns of politics. A crossroads in Sarajevo. A beer hall in Munich. A palace called Winter. A harbour called Pearl. A line called ...