Critique of the Times

The name Sania Mirza seems everywhere these days. Ubiquitous is what they say, I believe. In the sleazy, unimaginative headlines of newspapers. In those garish, framed boxes on websites. On sacrosanct Facebook status messages. And all-pervading Twitter, of course. For all the wrong reasons. Ok, I will concede that Shoaib Malik too is all over. Maybe more so. For all the same wrong reasons. But to me, it is Sania who matters first. That Paki Shoaib Malik is incidental, circumstantial. Come to...

The most recurring, quoted number in India today is 1,411 – the mean count of tigers ostensibly remaining in the wild in the country. Everyone knows and everyone seems pretty upset. The number, of course, can be disputed and refuted too if needed; but that can be the topic for another discussion. What is evident is that given the rate of decline, it might be just another 20, or maybe 50, years by when tigers would vanish from our landscape. This number, till the other day, remained in the...

It ought to be counted as one of India’s most downplayed stories of the day. It is about the struggle to save an ecosystem called Niyamgiri in Orissa from mining, deforestation and devastation. It is about indigenous people and the rights over their land. Vedanta Resources, a stinking rich British company owned by NRI Anil Agarwal, intends to dig an open-pit bauxite mine in Niyamgiri. This mine will destroy the forests on which the Dongria Kondh depend and wreck the lives of thousands of other...

It's the kind of news item that tends to get buried under others of heavier national importance; for it hardly has any news value that any journalist worth one's salt would ascribe to it. This particular news item one read was about 36 former militants being appointed on Saturday as constables in the Jammu and Kashmir police. No big deal, that. In any case, nothing new about such a measure either. It is not the news item in itself that is a cause for worry – reading between its lines is, and...

In July I received a mail from a journalist who wanted to pitch me an interesting story idea from Kashmir. The mail was directed to an account I hardly check. Not that it would have made much difference since Newswatch carries only content that has something to do with the news media. I gather she pitched the story to many publications. The story, let me tell you, never saw the light of day anywhere in this country where Kashmir is such an emotively jingoistic issue. Close to a month later, the...

The history of the Northeast is the history of romantic insurgencies and pyrrhic wars, devastating blasts and brutal carnages, internecine squabbles and ethnic clashes, political chicanery and myopic governance, and what have you. It is also the history of atrocities. By the agents of the State. When Naga women were raped on church pulpits by the sacrosanct Indian forces, it was something that never coalesced into the form of news. But these days some news do trickle out. Like that of a gutsy...

Mohammad bin Tughlaq had ruled over vast stretches and tracts of land that today constitute India. He was a great ruler who left behind a legacy. A legacy that is today most identifiable as an adjectival derivative of his name – Tughlaqesque. The word is too complex to have an exact synonym. Tughlaqesque would mean exotic, Quixotic, far-fetched, well-meaning, ill-conceived, arrogant, grandiose, all at the same time. It is also a word that can be routinely associated with India’s later-day rulers...

It is hardly surprising that International Tiger Day, today – September 28, has almost passed by without even a purr. Few know about it, still fewer remember. In all likelihood that is what is going to happen to the tiger too – it will disappear sans even a protesting growl. Its howls, when trapped or killed mercilessly, are never heard anyway. For a nation that cannot even remember its own national animal on International Tiger Day, perhaps that is the fate that starkly awaits the royal beast...

When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) launched its India Shining campaign, it had a fertile ground on which to sow the seeds of its electoral sloganeering. Newspaper editorials were going dizzy with India’s forever rising gross domestic product (GDP). Pundits were engaged in animated discussions over India being the economic superpower of the new century, nay millennium. Headlines every day would hysterically tell us that the Sensex had scaled a new high...

Some people haven’t the faintest clue as to how they should go around making opulent style statements. Especially, if done with an inordinate amount of insensitivity and tastelessness. Worse still, if they have the nerve to defend it as callously. So when Vogue India carried a 16-page photo shoot of decidedly-not-rich people strutting $10,000 Hermès Birkin bags, $5,000 Burberry umbrellas, or $100 Fendi bibs, the magazine was asking for some censure. This came in the form of three articles – in...