Only last week Assam was celebrating Magh Bihu. In the chilly winters, people gathered in groups around bonfire and chatted. Keep your ears on any of these chats and one topic re-emerges — Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi’s controversial statements and flip-flops that have been doing the rounds. In the aftermath [...]

On the 23rd January, 1998, Attia (my Baaji Jania) passed away. This year is her 100th birthday. Attia Hosain was my ideal person since I was a child. She lived in England soon after the Partition of India in 1947, although she did visit Pakistan and India sometimes to meet [...]

The Indo-Pak peace process is coming towards a halt after the killing of 2 Indian and 1 Pakistani soldiers at the Line of Control. Indian and Pakistani civil societies, who were working for peace between the two countries were happy and hoping ‘visas on arrival for senior citizens’ as a [...]

As news arrives of certain leaked cables which suggest that under-siege Syrian President Bashar al-Assad may have in fact already used chemical weapons on its own population, the world sits on the side line and watches as hundreds of people continue to be massacred on a daily basis. Over the [...]

“I am now in this place where you should never come. We call it Onkalo. Onkalo means ‘hiding place’. In my time it is not yet finished, though work began in the 20th century, when I was just a child. Work will be completed in the 22nd century, long after [...]

If you are a woman reading this, raise your hand if you’ve never been groped, molested, whistled at, had lewd comments passed at you or stalked on the streets in India. I think there would be a limited show of hands. Not a single woman I know, and have asked [...]

Photographs by Shailendra Pandey

Can mining only lead to destruction and have no beneficial effect on the community as claimed by the minister for rural development Jairam Ramesh? Speaking to a tribal audience, it might be a populist thing to say that mining can only lead to poverty and it is neither environmentally sustainable [...]

Zero Dark Thirty has hit the screens to much controversy, debate, acclaim and box office success. The film deals with the decade long hunt for master terrorist Osama Bin Laden The film is a fascinating study in looking at shades of good and evil. There is a thin line between [...]

For long, Kashmir was portrayed in Bollywood movies a beautiful place on earth where actors were shown eating in its magnificent houseboats, drinking from fresh spring waters and making merry in the Valley’s lush slopes. But away from its conventional habit, post 1989 Hindi movies on Kashmir slowly harped on [...]

Napoleon is rumoured to have advised that nations must learn to ignore the pinpricks of war if they were to avoid the cannon shots there were sure to follow, but the Emperor had no answer to Fourth Generation Warfare either, nor did he know of nuclear deterrence. In the realm [...]

Little less than a month back I went for a meditation retreat. A day before I entered ten days of silence, a girl was raped and brutally assaulted in a bus in Delhi. There were reports of outrage and public protests. Ten days later when I stepped out, I found [...]