West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has been accused, and not without reasons, for appeasing Muslims at the cost of enraging the Hindus. Her appeasement politics has in many ways helped the Bharatiya Janata Party to further its communal agenda in the state with sections of the people, especially on the right of the political…
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 painter and intellectual who played…
Read more A tin can tied to a dog’s tail: Tagore’s post-Nobel experience
Well, this post is also turning out to be centered on Arnab Goswami, the editor-in-chief of Times Now and anchor of the nightly Newshour debate. It is not by design. I got to know today that the government will provide him with Y-category security, and I just happened to have some free time in my…
Arnab Goswami “throws out” actor Mita Vashist, a panellist and an invited guest, from his show and Twitterverse has erupted in a frenzy of ecstasy at the anchor’s heroic deed. They are celebrating that she got her “comeuppance”. I did not watch that debate (I don’t watch Arnab Goswami’s shows. I am too weak for that). And I do…
Read more Arnab ‘throws out’ a TV guest, and how does that make him look?
Not happy with the government? Angry with the pizza deliverer? Got a headache? Baby’s irresistible in her new dress? Or, simply feeling like a poem? For every situation, there’s social media to bank on. Put it up on Facebook, or Twitter, or other such places. Grievances may still remain and anger may amplify, but you are still happy; happy that you’ve…
Joseph Nye defined soft power as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments.” Ever since Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister and began travelling the world on carefully scripted, much publicized missions, a lot is being spoken about the country’s soft power – how the land of the…
Read more ‘If India wants to be taken seriously internationally it has to deal with its fault lines’
They know there will be no justice. There will be no judicial trial. They will not be caught. Brutal killing of bloggers has become some sort of fashion in Bangladesh of late. Every once in a while there are headlines of some free-thinking bloggers being killed or injured in attacks by religious extremists. Therefore, it was only…
Last month, I attended a weekly rally of the infamous Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, better known as Pegida, a far-right organisation that shot into news last year for its mass demonstrations against “Islamisation” of Germany. I had a long conversation with its founder Lutz Bachmann and leader Tatjana Festerling. Both were…
Read more Germany’s anti-Islamist group has a new hero: Narendra Modi
Bangladesh celebrated its 44th Victory Day on December 16 last year. On that day in 1971, the Pakistan Army surrendered before the India-Bangladesh forces in Dhaka, leading to the liberation of erstwhile East Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh. The rare public surrender at the Race Course grounds marked the end of the 13-day India-Pakistan…
Read more A culture that ignores poetry is a defective culture
