CREDO I am; we are A million miles or more from our nearest star. We absorb us, I absolve me, Profligate in our insensitivity. One
He gets into an airplane on the island of Taipei, and is about to escape, when his plane crashes during attempts to take off.
There’s a new player, who has improved tremendously while no one was paying attention: Hamas. It has done extremely well to breach Israel’s supposedly impenetrable
Virendranath Chattopadhyay was the son of Aghorenath Chattopadhyay of Hyderabad, India; his siblings in a large family included the poet Sarojini Naidu and the playwright
Major James Strachey Barnes was, in fact, an Anglo-Indian born in Simla. He had grown up with his maternal grandparents in Italy, then he studied
And ever since then, a shibboleth is a word that must be pronounced to demonstrate the proper belonging to a community. Without having the proper
It also follows that plagiarism is endemic and integral to academic worlds; and that professionals plagiarise in ways that they will get away with. The
This would have made no difference to Paul Robeson, when he chose to sing the song. He was comfortable with the work of Dvořák; he
That’s the basic problem: we identify ‘our’ heroes in the past, and identify our present and future with lessons we apparently draw from them. That’s
‘Dreadlocks’ were not, in fact, from North America, nor were they from the ‘original’ African cultures that former slaves were forced to forget in American
But a name tells you not very much more than distant origins; and the same name, from the same part of the world, can be
I can read 'Hindi'; I can speak bad Hindi if I am allowed to disregard all rules of gender; and I can write it if
A slow process of acclimatisation to the realities of Hindutva has been underway for some time now. There have been bandwagon jumpers and opportunists, there
The books that we now read, and which appear at bookshops once self-labelled as ‘left’, are less about the (apparently always predominantly white, male, and
A back-to-back rereading of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and Karl Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in terms of their political visions is not as
We sat together in Calcutta at the dining table of the old crumbling 1920s house in which we then lived, my progressive bookseller and myself,
