I have always been totally in awe, and even jealous, of people who manage to stay level-headed at all times, never uttering an out-of-place remark; those who can remain calm and composed in spite of all the excitement or provocation. Today, it was Swapna Burman who totally swept me off my feet. The 21-year-old Indian…
Last month, I visited Margaret’s Hope tea estate. It was in this tea garden, home to some of the world’s finest teas, that workers created history of sorts when six of them got killed in police firing on June 25, 1955. They were part of a protest demonstration, fighting for their labour rights. The incident…
For a mother, travelling with the family is not necessarily a vacation; it is just a change of location. Doing the same things–looking after the children, and taking care of the husbands–in a different place instead of her usual home. Can a woman not really have a holiday, as in, a proper holiday holiday; in…
Last week, Cobrapost published an exposé, codenamed Operation 136, which showed several Indian news media companies were willing to push Hindutva agenda through their content in exchange of money, large sums of it. This big story has been largely ignored by most of Indian media, for obvious reasons. But when even the more saner voices and…
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has been accused of appeasing Muslims at the cost of enraging the Hindus. Her “appeasement politics”, it is said, has helped the Bharatiya Janata Party to further its communal agenda in the state. The Hindu right does not like the “special treatment” given to Muslims, be it in holding…
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’
Anuradha Sharma 