CATEGORIES

Smog Capital Of The World: Delhi

What’s with the air in Delhi that a festival of lights plunged it into darkness? Can we read the signal in the smog?

Modi's Trump Card: Demonetisation

Demonetisation is a dramatic Modistroke. And well-timed too, ahead of crucial polls.

Clueless In Cash Country

Outside urban india, it is largely hard cash that has currency.

Loose Screws In The Tata Wheels

Behind Cyrus Mistry’s booting out was his doggedly independent action, and Ratan tata’s intolerance of it.

Teotwawki: Okay If We Confirm That Tomorrow?

What if the science of prediction is a fictive process and nothing more? Is the future, then, even if loosely knowable, specifically unpredictable?

Too Many Players In El Dorado

When Hollywood studios entered the Indian film market, they were being touted as the game­changers. Now, they are planning to quit the game they couldn’t quite comprehend.

Balancing The Wheel

With polls pending, Khaleda Zia in jail and Hasina pampering Islamists, Bangladesh is on edge

Hunger, Bloodthirst, Murder

An adivasi’s lynching sparks an artistic outpouring that only discomfits activists

AAP Among Unequals

Angry, Alternative Politics, they called it. But has AAP failed to redeem its pledge? Is it too angry, and not alternative enough?

Immovable And Rusted Objects

Obstructionist bureaucracy needs an injection of specialists

A Broom In The Wrong Place

There’s talk of President’s Rule, but, for better optics, the BJP will more likely let Delhi’s AAP government hoist itself with its own petard

A Party That Lost Its Fig Leaf

AAP grew overambitious; its leader anyway tended to be autocratic. The party’s slide began when it became unscrupulous. Will it reform its ways?

Scent Of The Lotus Bloom

It’s not just about dashing moves, their motive has to reach people. Modi knows it.

Broomstruck In Bathinda

Akalis are seen as useless amid economic distress; the Congress is patchily popular. It’s the AAP many in Punjab are turning to.

Woof Of Nepotism

Public outcry grows over a ‘job-giving clique’ around CM

Scent Of A Phul Bloom

After almost a quarter century, Uttar Pradesh politics is witnessing an almost impossible pheno­menon: the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party have joined hands in the poll arena.

Yonder, The Dark Star

The CPI(M) should have emulated some social movements in India. A know-it-all attitude undid the party.

X Files: Karma Or Karti

Here’s what the Sheena Bora murder case has to do with investment in INX and the arrest of Karti Chidambaram

Addicted To Melancholia, And All Its Glory

In awe of the self-destructive, tragic lover, Hindi cinema continues to reimagine Devdas, as if for each generation

New Lock For EU's Digital Mines

Indian companies dealing with European data wait ­anxiously as the EU pushes in new security rules

The Vulture On The Wire

As more of our lives comes to be lived online, the worst we encounter or evade in ‘real’ life reappears digitally magnified with a vengeance­

Rain Or Shine, The Glow Eludes Growers Yet Again

Sky-high tomato prices have set off WhatsApp jokes, but the farmer is shortchanged—and left only to weep.

Breaking Ice On A Winding Road

India-Nepal ties had hit a nadir. It’s up to Nepal’s visiting PM, Prachanda, to restore them to an assured ease.

Efficiency in Steel

VSP Rebars with superior and corrosion resistant properties are the new generation high strength ribbed reinforcement bars....

Mallika Srinivasan TAFE

Mallika joined TAFE in 1986 as general manager with a clear vision taking her heirloom to new heights. The Eicher acquisition did that for her.

Dr Verghese Kurien (1921-2012) AMUL

IN the paradoxical light that past events reveal themselves to us, two facts stand out. One, Verghese Kurien, father of the White Revolution, was as distant as possible from a certain ideal currently preferred. As The Economist noted wryly in its obituary, “He was born a Christian, became an atheist, ate beef, and liked a drink—but not milk. In fact, he actively disliked it.” And he spent all his working life in Gujarat—a different kind of laboratory then.

Just Short Of Full Disclosure

For slain journo J. Dey’s kin, it’s the end of a seven-year wait for justice—almost, for one accused is still in Dubai.

Victory Is Just A Number

Poaching, the BJP avers, is never its business. Yet the party won’t say how it is to muster the numbers it lacks.

Ping-Pongology: Table For Ten

The story behind the gradual, gratifying turn of Indian table tennis

I'd Make Sanju Even If I Hadn't Worked With Sanjay

They collapsed the boundaries between mainstream entertainers and meaningful cinema much earlier in the day and, released at crucial post-lib junctures, came to almost define a 21st century national cinema—passing muster with the masses and the classes alike. Just four films—Munna Bhai MBBS (2003), Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006), 3 Idiots (2009) and PK (2014)—make Nagpur-born director Rajkumar Hirani one of the finest filmmakers of his generation. The 55-year-old auteur is now ready with his next, Sanju, a biopic depicting the turbulent life of Bollywood’s enfant terrible, Sanjay Dutt. With Ranbir Kapoor in the lead, the film, due for release on June 29, may well be the master filmmaker’s litmus test, as he has made a foray into the unfamiliar and dicey terrain of biopics with a movie on the life of somebody he has known professionally and personally for years. In conversation with Giridhar Jha, Hirani spells out the reasons behind making the biopic, dismissing the charge that he has made it to glorify his actor-friend, known for his chequered life and career. Excerpts from the interview: