The Ninth Mumbai International Literary Festival
Thursday, November 15th to Sunday, November 18th 2018
October 16, 2018
On Stage November 2018 If you are a famous person – and many of you who read this column are really well-known – would you like a film done on your life? That`s not an offer, just a question! It`s prompted by something that troubled me while I watched, transfixed, Netflix`s brilliant series The Crown. […]
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September 29, 2018
JAMES BOSWELL’S LEGENDARY biography of Samuel Johnson was based on first-hand experience of living, working and travelling with the great man for most of his life. Ramachandra Guha, denied that privilege, has done the next best thing—immersing himself for a decade in virtually everything Gandhi ever wrote or said and most of what other people […]
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September 23, 2018
The Modi government has run out of intellectual capital and this explains its stall in key sectors and fading momentum. Let’s set it up with three questions. Is the Narendra Modi government talent-averse? Second, if so, is this the most talent-averse leadership in seven decades? And third, does it really matter, for Modi, BJP, and […]
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September 12, 2018
You may or may not know that the National Ease of Living Index was released by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs last month. Now that you know, you may or may not care. Should you? I am not quite sure. When it was released, the average Mumbaikar`s reaction ranged from disbelief to laughter […]
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September 9, 2018
Someone should calm Virat Kohli down and make him study the situation instead of screaming at it “We made England earn their win.” That and similar other uncharacteristically modest statements formed the gist of Virat Kohli’s post match press conference after the Fourth Test at Southampton. That merits a look at the record so far on […]
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September 9, 2018
Nearly seventy-one years after adopting one of the world’s most liberal constitutions, India can finally celebrate the expunging of a nasty colonial-era provision in its penal code, Section 377, which criminalised ‘whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman, or animal.’ Glory Glory Section 377 made any sex apart […]
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September 3, 2018
Those who worked with him and those whose lives he touched knew the former United Nations Secretary-General possessed a rare ingredient not always found in successful men – he was a wonderful human being. When the call came from an excited colleague at 4:58am New York time on October 12, 2001, telling me the United […]
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September 1, 2018
The latest news about self-driving cars is that they are not coming to India any time soon. This is not because we have an unlimited supply of drivers for hire which makes automated cars unnecessary, but because these cars are controlled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), and AI can`t cope with our anarchic traffic. A self-driving […]
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August 31, 2018
I was a student in London when I read Naipaul`s An Area of Darkness. It was a mistake, because as anyone who has experienced it, being away from your country makes you rosy-eyed and nostalgic, and reality (especially the sordid kind), fades into the distance. So I read it with mounting outrage, and in fact wrote […]
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August 30, 2018
Never has the separation of powers between executive and legislative organs been more necessary than today. It has become increasingly clear that Prime Minister Narendra Modi runs a parliamentary system in a presidential style. This gives Indians the worst of both worlds: an unfettered executive with an automatic parliamentary majority – which, unlike true presidential systems, is […]
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August 28, 2018
Some four million people in Assam state, nearly all of them Bengali Muslims who have lived in India for more than four decades, are at risk of disenfranchisement after being excluded from the National Registry of Citizens. That will help the Hindu nationalist government in the next general election, but not the goal of peace […]
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