A leader must inspire the people and the elites! »
India needs a thinking Prime Minister, an activist Prime Minister!
India at the cross-roads!
The UPA government is past its mid-term. Already there are tremors in Delhi after the two successive defeats in Punjab and Uttaranchal. The BJP is on the revival trail. There is depression in the Congress camp; there is jubilation in the BJP circles.
Remember [...]
Attention, Sonia Gandhi! »
Rural development, a tired theme?
But still it drives fear and tremors in Delhi!
Ministers can proactively do many things!
Corporate social responsibility can be identified and publicized!
Civil society initiatives need appreciated and recognized by the governments. The PM must be silently cursing the electorate of Punjab and Uttaranchal for being ungrateful. The Finance minister must be blaming [...]
PM’s articulations blurred? »
The PM stands a bereft orphan!
With major electoral defeats, what clarity little clarity we had is missing! The Congress Party faced two electoral defeats in Punjab and Uttaranchal. The third in UP surely looks like a foregone one. In such a dismal scenario, what articulations the Congress has? What major introspection has taken place?
Philosophy, Politics, Economy and Society »
Academic knowledge is not enough!
Also economic knowledge is also not enough!
The world needs more interactive civil society activism!
There is A Knowledge Commission deliberating about creating a knowledge society. But what is knowledge precisely. Knowledge is a word first coined by a management guru, Peter Drucker, 30 years ago. So also came the knowledge worker. And [...]
My Oxford day intellectuals and scholars »
I have written elsewhere, some time ago, about the number of persons who influenced my thought and also the way I think about issues. Those whom I didn’t not know personally but whose books influenced me form one set of such persons. These range from poets to philosophers, journalists, men like Boris Pasternak and other [...]
Public Schools? Where are they? What use they have? »
Do they produce leaders? Not anymore!
With all pretensions of a public school education, the neavou riche and the old families too stick to an ever-constant Indian prototype. The students are all driven by the predominant middle class aspirations of IIT/IMM/competitive education. The new generation Marwari/Punjabi parents might opt for a family business. Even here the [...]
A life unparallelled/A life with few parallels »
Each generation learns to study, learn and like to remember certain historic moments or some individuals whom that generation takes as extra-ordinary individuals. They may be leaders, leaders of politics or society or in some significant ways some individuals who in the short run might have had immense impact on that generation. However in the [...]
Congress Forum for Socialist Action »
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My entry into politics started as soon as I came back from England in 1961-62. Fresh from my Oxford Fabian socialist enthusiasm I looked for socialist friends in the Congress party. In 1962 or so, [...]
First poetry book in Tamil, 1959 »
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This was my first poetry book in Tamil published in 1959 while I was in England. Like all first poetry books this is a thin volume of few pages got together by a few friends [...]
Life and Art of C N Vasudevan »
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This was a rare book that brings to light what the outside world does not know about how Rabindranath Tagore’s arts, in particular the famous Santiniketan, style of dancing was evolved. Tagore was infact lucky [...]