History is humanity’s perpetual memoir whose plot carries a subtext of irony. The indignation of New York’s anti-Semitic mayor Zohran Mamdani towards Mohan Madhukar Bhagwat, the sixth and current Sarsanghchalak of the RSS addressing Indian-Americans is imbued with deep irony. This resentment of Mamdani, a practising Muslim, duplicated a profound dislike of the RSS, which the global liberal-left apparatus casts as the embodiment of exclusion. Bhagawat’s New York script does

THE FACE OF THE STATE: How One Man’s Image Became the Machinery of Modern Indian Democracy There was a time when the Indian government announced a scheme. Today, the government often announces the man who announced the scheme. Open a newspaper and there he is. Watch television and there he is. Look at a government billboard, railway station, or welfare programme advertisement and the familiar face appears again: Narendra Modi, looking directly at the citizen—sometimes smiling

I was touched by a post someone sent me on WhatsApp. It stirred nostalgia and a bit of sadness. There was a photograph in my grandmother’s house in the village of Manali. It’s the kind you see on Instagram but is a real one, yellowing at the edges, taken sometime in the early 1960s. In it, she stands in a mundu, its border gleaming burnt gold, and her hair dark against the jasmine flowers. Behind her, the Onam pookalam is a riot of colors: reds and yellows and whites arranged

The IndiGo implosion is far more than a flurry of flight fiascos. It lays bare a deeper disease of monopoly muscle and sarkari selfishness. It is also the latest chapter in a very old Indian story: our political and corporate establishments share a quiet, well-honed disdain for the ordinary Indian’s time, dignity and rights. From colonial salt taxes to nationalised bank queues to modern telecom blackouts, Indian institutions, both public and private, have long shared the beli

India’s problem has never been difference. It has been the sudden urge, every few decades, to pretend that difference was a clerical error. That if we just revised the rolls, corrected the names, purified the lists, the noise would reduce to a chant. This fantasy returns with remarkable regularity. Empires tried it. Reformers tried it. Colonisers perfected it with files and forms. Postcolonial states inherit it with better software and worse patience. The temptation is unders

Drive through Palghat at dusk, and you’ll find a Kerala that still remembers itself. The paddy fields stretch in emerald sheets, their...

I thought about hair and betrayal when I first read about Israel bombing Iranian nuke factories. There was a time when India could have...

Don’t leave it too late. Places like this don’t stay forever. They return—softly, without complaint—to the earth that birthed them. Back...

Hidden gems aren’t found, they’re felt— in a change of wind, a hush in the trees, a turn in the road that seems to remember. One such...

For a few quiet years, I lived in a cottage in Mussoorie with my three dogs. It was built in 1864 with the typical corrugated tin roof...

History may one day judge that the single greatest failure of Indian strategic thinking wasn’t the loss of territory or the delay in...

“We no longer live in a world,” said President John F. Kennedy during the white-knuckled hours of the Cuban Missile Crisis, “where only...

By now, Greta Thunberg’s name is less associated with climate data and more with a kind of messianic performance activism—where outrage...

Love, that primal force, is both a sanctuary and a battleground. It promises transcendence but often delivers tragedy. Passion fuels its...

When a meme can land you in jail, what’s the real joke? Last week, an angry Bombay High Court yelled at the Maharashtra government which...

This blog is written by ChatGPT and edited later. But not much. Mussoorie, the charming hill station located in Uttarakhand, is a popular...

I am a dog person. But I'm not an all kinds of dog person. I don't like small dogs because they can be insecure, or think they are bigger...

There is something disreputable about snooping. Like the cloying smell of old laundry that lingers in the air after sweaty assignations...

The mist gets a lot of bad press. It is associated with vampires, other denizens of the night, murderers and highwaymen and all sorts of...

People with a taste for butter chicken and dal makhni usually gravitate to Mussoorie town and the hostelries in and around Mall Road....