The only person who was happy when my Italy trip got cancelled was the French banker whose memoir I was ghostwriting. He was in a hurry to see his book published. And I was looking forward to a two-week break in Italy. The flight tickets were done and I was already in Calcutta to apply…
Originally posted on Anuradha Sharma:
A tin can tied to a dog’s tail. An overwhelmed Rabindranath Tagore thus described the euphoria surrounding his Nobel Prize in Literature 103 years ago. “The perfect whirlwind of public excitement it has given rise to is frightful,” he wrote in a letter to close friend William Rothenstein, the English…
She hurtles down the empty road clutching the lifeless body of her three-year-old son, howling. Her husband walks after her, their other child in his arms. A man, an onlooker, with a cell phone is filming them while walking with them. At some point she sits on the road, rending the air with her wails,…
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s admirers are always quick to point out his humble origins to justify their unquestioning love for him. “He has made it in spite of being a chaiwala in the past. He made it on his own merit (as opposed to you-know-who, the dynast),” is something I keep hearing. Modi’s PR machinery…
If you ask me, the single biggest contributor to the mess that India is in now is our media. Any problem–be it economy or the endangering of civil rights–would not have come to this pass if media had done its job. Just its job of reporting facts–nothing more, nothing less. But, Indian media–most of it–works…
