The Marxist concept of the free press, as enunciated forcefully and at length by Marx himself, is not to be confused with the vitiated role of a nomin

THE anticlimax would be hilarious if it was not preposterous. The rabble, which goes by the name of Karni Sena, withdrew its agitation against

IN 18th century England, the book would have invited dire punitive action under the

AS 2017 comes to a close in political disarray, there are signals that bode an interesting, more competitive, year ahead. The elections in Gujarat con

THE melting pot may have ceased to be an apposite, or politically proper, metaphor for the integration of diverse immigrant communities into the way o

In Tamil cinema, a band of directors has been quietly making films grounded in local realities and away from big-star formulas but working within t

IMAGINE a documentary set against the backdrop of the violence unleashed against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, in which those who killed, maimed, raped,

ONCE upon a time, when it was still a good word, “development” was Indian television’s single most important agenda. An experiment in the 1970s,

WHEN the most powerful person in the world, before and after he became that, has been making a series of atrocious comments and charges, many of them

IN his Charles Eliot Norton lectures delivered in the early 1990s at Harvard University, subsequently compiled as

FIRST it was operation appropriation. With abstruse, contrived and convoluted reasoning, citing examples that varied from the ridiculous to the fantas

These eleven inspiring lines of Tagore, conjuring a freshly minted idea of a free India, are of course utopian and aspirational, as the best of poetry

LONG, long ago, when the sky stretched to meet the earth on the distant horizon so that the gods could step down from their clouds on to terra firma a

WELL over 30 years later the glare of the July mid-morning sun on the Galle sea face in Colombo was as unchangingly harsh. The blare of the traffic al

WHEN John Maynard Keynes, in the context of the crisis of the Great Depression of the 1930s, suggested that the government should actually pay people

THE launch of a missile and the launch of a TV news channel were entirely different things until now. Until, that is, the supremos of the Democratic P

SOME adages turn on themselves. Or maybe that should read, adages sometimes turn on themselves. The one we see doing this with such frequency nowadays

IT was a sting all right. A sting that exposed a devious conspiracy by a new Malayalam TV news channel to ensnare a Minister. This is how the conspira

There was a shortlist of 10 Malayalam films made in 2016 before the three members of the jury for the John Abraham award this year. As a jury member I

THOMAS PAINE in his

It is one hell of a spiritual sell.

IT may be both stretching a metaphor and mixing metaphors, but one is nevertheless tempted to vest the cyclone Vardah, which lashed coastal Tamil Nadu

ARTHUR MILLER characterised a good newspaper as a nation talking to itself. That was in the early 1960s. It was easier and less complicated then to re

THE German philosopher Gotthold Lessing, who was a precursor of existentialism, had observed: “If God set forth before me the Eternal, unchangeable