Vande Mataram

The “dead issue” is brought back to life yet again by some Muslim clerics who issued a fatwa against the recital of Vande Mataram by Muslims. In response, Hindu hard-liners retorted that those who refuse to sing the national song should go to Pakistan.
Two connected but fundamentally different claims are made here: (1) that Vande [...]

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 empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other [...]

Cattle Class

The recent Twitter controversy about Shashi Tharoor’s “insensitive” remark reminded me of this cartoon by Mike Luckovich published about two years ago.

The joke, as Amit Verma explained on Times Now show, is on the airlines, not on the passengers.

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 about this new book on Jinnah written by Jaswant Singh: Jinnah – India, Partition, Independence. But then [...]

Like an Ever-flowing River

Last month, English language added the millionth word to its repertoire. (Don’t as me, kaun sa labz?)
Compare this with Hindi, which has only about 120,000 words.
And meanwhile, only 14,135 people listed Sanskrit as their primary language in the 2001 Indian census.
Why do some languages die out and others survive the test of time? What is [...]

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 penury, the Ministry of Coal has decided to employ her to run errands in Coal India’s [...]

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 process of State Islamization, emphasized by Zia ul Haq in the 80’s, the ultimate cause [...]

Numbers Don’t Lie

According to the Benford’s law, the first digits in many real life data follow a particular pattern such that the number 1 will be the most common as the first digit, number 2 will be the next most common, then 3 and so on. For example, one out of three times you will see 1 [...]

Linguistic Nationalism

The linguistic aspects of ethnic, religious, regional and cultural conflicts in four South Asian countries: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, are often left unexplored. Consider the following three such examples where each nation faced a similar situation of deciding what its national language was going to be. To impose or not to impose, was [...]

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 opposed to say a historian’s, interpretation of the cultural history of the Hindus. Here’s one review.
Below is an excerpt [...]