The writer is at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

April 11,2005 00:37:48 AM
A bus is not a glamorous object. It does not have the elegant eloquence of the dove with its gracefully outstretched wings and pristine whit...
Mon, Apr 11, 2005
March 26,2005 00:00:00 AM
Some time in the eighties, the features magazine I then worked for asked me to do a story on the alleged casting couch in the film industry ...
Sat, Mar 26, 2005
March 12,2005 00:00:00 AM
Mumbai is in the news. Not like Jharkhand and Bihar and the Indo-Pak series are in the news, but in a more fundamental, a more reflective so...
Sat, Mar 12, 2005
March 02,2005 00:00:00 AM
Imagine a cigarette being unravelled. The paper coming apart. The filter dropping off — an ineffectual stub. The tobacco spilling out, ...
Wed, Mar 02, 2005
February 12,2005 00:00:00 AM
This week on the Oprah Winfrey show, the interviewee was a young woman called Amber who had gone out with what could not but be described as...
Sat, Feb 12, 2005
January 31,2005 00:00:00 AM
On Republic Day last week, victims of a building collapse in Ahmedabad prepared to move back into their new homes four full years after the ...
Mon, Jan 31, 2005
January 15,2005 00:00:00 AM
It seems hard to recall now that for close to half a decade following Independence we lived with the odd assumption that we were better off ...
Sat, Jan 15, 2005
January 04,2005 00:00:00 AM
Anybody who keeps asking — and there are many who do — why feminists oppose beauty contests should watch two film clips currently ...
Tue, Jan 04, 2005
December 18,2004 00:00:00 AM
A few days ago I was chatting with a friend, a Mumbai stockbroker. This was a man in his late thirties, sophisticated, upper class, and a fe...
Sat, Dec 18, 2004
December 04,2004 00:00:00 AM
What a salacious few weeks these have been! India’s most powerful corporate duo slugging it out in public. A venerated and elderly reli...
Sat, Dec 04, 2004
November 22,2004 00:00:00 AM
It has been nearly four years since the Gujarat earthquake. Yet in central Kutch, which suffered the worst of the ravages, the effects are s...
Mon, Nov 22, 2004
October 23,2004 00:00:00 AM
Edward Said identified the tread of empire in Jane Austen’s works. Filmmaker Patricia Rozema brought it into her version of Mansfield P...
Sat, Oct 23, 2004
October 09,2004 00:00:00 AM
Punjabi Saga is a compilation of three volumes that tells the story of five generations of a Punjabi family. It is also the autobiography of...
Sat, Oct 09, 2004
September 27,2004 00:00:00 AM
Despite the media’s breast-beating and the periodic, usually self serving, protestations of political parties on the subject, the crimi...
Mon, Sep 27, 2004
September 11,2004 00:00:00 AM
In a special issue in the fall of the year 2000, Forbes magazine listed ten popular American expressions. They were: Get a life; Why not?; D...
Sat, Sep 11, 2004
August 28,2004 00:00:00 AM
Last week-end, an intensive two-day programme, consisting of play readings, a documentary, speeches and critiques, organised as a tribute to...
Sat, Aug 28, 2004
August 14,2004 00:00:00 AM
How do you write a whopper of a bestseller? You take religion, controversy, art, puzzles, a boy, a girl, mysterious villains, glamorous loca...
Sat, Aug 14, 2004
July 31,2004 00:00:00 AM
So Jemima Goldsmith and Hugh Grant are an item. Or no, it’s more than that. Hugh is seriously involved with Jemima, the first time he h...
Sat, Jul 31, 2004
July 17,2004 00:00:00 AM
It was called Pilla House though there was no tint of yellow anywhere in sight. The name was in actual fact a corrupted form of the English ...
Sat, Jul 17, 2004
July 05,2004 00:00:00 AM
What is Indian history? What is Indian culture? Over the last few years these questions have been thrust to the forefront of public consciou...
Mon, Jul 05, 2004
June 19,2004 00:00:00 AM
In Mani Ratnam’s Yuva, four rough and tough guys in Marlborough gear strut into a legislative house as the camera pans over a sea of wh...
Sat, Jun 19, 2004
June 05,2004 00:00:00 AM
We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controv...
Sat, Jun 05, 2004
May 22,2004 00:00:00 AM
It is a situation rich in irony. A prime minister to be sworn in by a president, both of separate minority communities under the benign gaze...
Sat, May 22, 2004
May 10,2004 00:00:00 AM
Sometimes things take the most unexpected turn. The largest public demonstrations the western world has seen since the anti-nuclear movement...
Mon, May 10, 2004
April 24,2004 00:00:00 AM
The walls of the first class ladies compartment on the Mumbai local are usually decorated with lurid drawings of the female anatomy and scri...
Sat, Apr 24, 2004





