Category Archives: History
Gandhi’s Rendezvous with Movies
I thought Ram Rajya (1943) was the first and only movie that Gandhi had ever seen. So I was quite surprised when I found out that it was not the only movie that he had watched. Moreover, it appears that it … Continue reading
Divine Justice?
The idiotic claims from televangelist Pat Robertson — that the earthquake in Haiti may be a blessing in disguise and is a result of the pact the Haitians made long time ago with Satan to help them against French imperialists … Continue reading
Filed under Current Affairs, History, Religion
Indian Summer
I just ordered Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire written by Alex Tunzelmann. Below is the first paragraph from the book: In the beginning there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent … Continue reading
Blaming Nehru
Here we go again. Nehru-bashing has been quite a popular fad nowadays (especially among the rightists) and so far he had been blamed for myriad things. But this recent assault, has a new edge. I was quite excited when I heard … Continue reading
Musht-e-Gubaar
The great-great-granddaughter of the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, Madhu, is illiterate, and makes a living by running a tea-stall with her mother in the slums of Calcutta. Thanks to an initiative by a journalist to rescue her from … Continue reading
Filed under Current Affairs, History
Repurcussions of Uncertainty
In a brief interview with the Economist magazine, Farzana Shaikh, the author of Making Sense of Pakistan, talks about the root causes of current problems in Pakistan. According to her, while the proximate cause of the current mess is the … Continue reading
Working with Available Light
In the introductory chapter of the book, The Hindus: An Alternate History, Doniger cites the Sufi parable of Mulla Nasrudin — the one in which after having lost his key inside his home during a night, Nasrudin was searching for … Continue reading
The Hindus: An Alternative History
I can’t wait to get hold of this new book The Hindus: An Alternative History written byWendy Doniger. She’s an ex-professor at the University of Chicago who has translated several ancient books written in Sanskrit. It will be interesting to see a philologist’s, as … Continue reading
The Importance of Second-tier Leadership
While reading Stephen Philip Cohen’s lucid, analytical and insightful book about Pakistan’s past, present and future: The Idea of Pakistan, I learned how Pakistan struggled with a void of political leadership that was immediately felt after the untimely death of … Continue reading
Socialist Leaders of The Pre-independence Era
Socialism was like the Spirit of the Age in pre-independence India. It’s not surprising, if a bit unsettling to some, that many of the freedom fighters got attracted to the lure of socialism as the correct medium for nation building while … Continue reading
