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Anniversary Blogging Festival
‘Do I dare…..Disturb the Universe?’ asked T S Eliot in his much celebrated poem ‘The love song of J Alfred Prufrock’. Centre Right India, an initiative started in 2010, began by asking similar question. Do we dare disturb the universe and can we challenge the status quo? As we celebrate...
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Book Review – Our Moon Has Blood Clots
A journey to the center of the Heart Truth has a remarkable quality about it. It reverberates loud and clear even when it is whispered. It can travel a long way even when it is feeble. Truth never gets tired, it never rests nor does it ever die. In fact,...
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Durbar and Idea of India
Durbar and Idea of India Some words and phrases gain traction from time to time in our daily discourse. One such word that I have noticed being used quite often these days is ‘Idea of India’. It is a lofty phrase and a flexible one too. Suddenly in every discussion...
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Republic of Fear
First came the terrible and unfortunate violence in Assam between indigenous Bodo Tribals and illegal Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants which left 75 dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. Then came the reports of violence from Mumbai, Lucknow, Allahabad and other places where unruly mob ostensibly fighting for the condition of Muslims...
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Theatre of the Absurd
Earlier this afternoon something rather strange happened with me. I was scrolling down my Twitter timeline when I came across some tweets joking about Youth Congress members burning copies of Times of India rather than TIME magazine, protesting the cover story that was rather critical of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s...
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News in the Time of Social Media
In Delhi power circles, Abhishek Manu Singhvi is known as suave, glib tongued and wealthy lawyer and politician. When the sex CD allegedly showing him in compromising position with a lady lawyer in court premises surfaced, this St. Stephen’s ,Cambridge and Harvard educated sophisticated Delhi boy did all the right...
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Let’s talk Gujarat 2002
Facts are boring. Truth is not sensational. Facts become sacrosanct because they are supported by hard evidence and statistics. Fiction on the other hand shares no such burden. Flights of fancy can soar to any heights. If there is a competition as to what is more engaging, fiction wins hands...
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Badge of shame
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s timeless classic “The Scarlet Letter” is set in a puritan settlement in Boston in 17th century. A young woman Hester Prynne lives in seclusion with her young daughter, scorned by everyone, and is forced to wear a huge scarlet letter ‘A’ on her chest, a punishment for her...
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The Lonely Forces
First a little digression: On one frosty February afternoon in 1990, when my family was still in Kashmir, my cousins and I were playing in the courtyard of our house. Target killings by armed jihadis were rampant those days on the streets of Srinagar and as a result curfew was...
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The politics around AFSPA
Long time ago, I made peace with something very basic about Kashmir. One could say the simplest and most obvious thing about Kashmir, yet it will invite multiple dissenting voices not based on logic but based on rhetoric. The noise gets so loud that it is hard to know truth...
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Secularism through the eyes of a Kashmiri Hindu
Does the name Vinod Pandit ring a bell? Probably not. This gentleman along with Sunita Sharma fasted for 10 days in Jammu last week hoping to get the attention of State government and preferably Central Government to the ‘Temple and Shrine bill’ pending in J&K state assembly. They were also...