June 16, 2020 Police brutality and institutionalized racism are tragic problems that beset American society. At least, in the US, there is open discussion on the subject. Something that does not happen in China’s Xinjiang province, which used to be called East Turkestan in the not so distant past. The American problems, I am convinced, […]
December 13, 2019 The Supreme Court’s Ayodhya judgment has been welcomed by a lot of people who can be described as detesters of the British Raj. And yet, oddly enough, the argument can be made that the judgment represents a vindication of the Indo-British encounter and a clear signal that we are members of what […]
November 08 , 2019 History overtook intellectual fashions. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed and India was faced with multiple crises characterized by high inflation, low growth, dwindling foreign trade and an impossible balance of payments situation. Willy-nilly, India adopted some aspects of so-called neo-liberalism – lower tariffs, fiscal discipline, elimination of an […]
August 20, 2019 Recent events in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh have forced us all to revisit the tenets of national or sub-national self-determination. In 1919, American President Woodrow Wilson articulated the rosy liberal vision of self-determination for national, sub-national, ethnic, linguistic, religious and racial groups. Conservatives, who were concerned with empirical, on-ground realities, rather than […]
June 08, 2019 The Swatantra Party, founded by C Rajagopalachari, was a glorious enterprise. It fought the Nehru-Mahalanobis economic model, which assumed that commissars in Yojana Bhavan knew better than ordinary citizens, entrepreneurs, traders, farmers. Its leader, who was popular as Rajaji, coined the expression “Permit-Licence Raj” to describe a dispensation more intrusively tyrannical than […]
May 21, 2018 In 1979, I shared a home with a pious Sunni Muslim colleague. He was a very sound accountant and I’d always defer to him on matters regarding amortization of goodwill, tax accounting and so on. And then one day, the Khomeini Revolution happened in Iran. I started noticing the acute discomfort that […]
February 21, 2018 Money is about accounting entries. Modern scams are all about stealing accounting entries, when the system has a ‘reconcilement’ problem. Looking back on different financial sector scandals in different countries at different times, where one has had the outlandish privilege of a microscopic view, one is struck by a distraught sense of […]
04 February, 2018 Chakravarti Rajagopalachari was a scholarly south Indian, and a classy writer in Tamil and in English. His sentences were short, chaste and lucid. His thoughts had a luminous integrity about them. He was the first to articulate the fact that we had a new tyranny in our fair land. The post-Avadi “Permit-License […]
January 04, 2018 Trump understands that the American people are very angry about aid being given to “ungrateful” recipients. The chattering classes among Indians who take their cues from the decrepit portals of the New York Times or the BBC are now in for a surprise. This so-called “buffoon” Donald Trump has started the New […]
December 23, 2017 ThePrint asks: After openly backing Israel, why is Modi’s India voting at UN like a Congress government? India continues with its pragmatic foreign policy. There is no need to vote differently from 128 countries on a sensitive matter. We have reason to be friendly with Israel and Arab countries. That tradition is […]