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A few evenings ago I was walking through a neighbourhood park when a nearby school function began.Loudspeakers crackled, children shuffled into uneven lines, and suddenly the opening notes of Jana Gana Mana floated across the grass. Almost without thinking, I stopped. It is simply something I have been used to doing for years. What caught my attention, however, was what happened around me. One person slowed down. Then another. Within seconds most of the park was standing stil

I went to the gym thinking it would be like any other day, nothing dramatic, just me, my playlist and the quiet agreement I have with myself that I will run enough to get that rush and then move on to weights. There are four treadmills there and I always end up choosing the same one. I cannot explain it, but I have a soft corner for that machine. It has seen me ambitious, distracted, overconfident and occasionally bargaining with myself at minute fourteen. That day the treadm

It is important to state this at the outset, not as a badge of identity but as necessary context. Faith is a lived reality for many of us in this country, including me. It shapes routine, instinct, and language, and it reveals itself quietly in habits such as temple visits, remembered prayers, and the reflexive bhagwaan bachalo whispered in moments of fear. For most believers, faith is not an argument to be defended but a relationship to be carried.   It is equally true that

Nations do not change overnight. They drift. One day the distance between where they began and where they stand becomes too wide to ignore. India is in such a moment. The Congress is confronting one too. Its crisis is not simply electoral decline. It is the collapse of a political imagination that shaped the Republic’s first decades. For most of independent India, Congress represented the vocabulary of power and the grammar of governance. It absorbed social tensions, mediated

Every few years our leaders rediscover the poor. They hold press conferences, announce schemes, wave documents in the air and declare that this time upliftment will finally happen. Then they go home, sleep peacefully, and wake up to discover the poor are still poor. What a relief. Imagine the chaos if upliftment actually worked. After all the entire system rests on a simple principle. Keep people hopeful but not mobile. Keep them grateful but not powerful. Keep them voting bu

Among the many small, unnoticed stories that run in parallel to a household, there was one that revealed itself slowly through the quiet constancy of a woman and a rabbit who lived near her home. The rabbit was not a pet, not a stray in the usual sense, and certainly not a responsibility assigned to anyone. It simply lived in the wild patch behind the row of houses where Sudha Amma, my househelp, resided. Over time, a quiet understanding grew between them. She offered food, a

Whenever someone asks, “Tell me something about yourself,” there is always a moment of silence that follows.   What do we really have to say? Our gender, our religion, our caste, our country of origin, our place of study, or the profession that sustains us? We list these things almost by reflex, as if the sum of them could ever capture the whole of who we are. And yet, if we look closely, how much of this did we ever choose? How much of it is simply what we were handed the da

Public service is spoken of with reverence, yet practised with contradiction. Politics, bureaucracy, and government are too often...

Colonialism leaves behind many scars, but not all are obvious. Some sit in stone, statues, railways, courtrooms. Others seep quietly into daily life, becoming habits so deep that we forget they were ever alien. In India, two such inheritances from the British, language and food, have travelled remarkably different roads. One became a permanent marker of class; the other so thoroughly naturalized that its foreignness was forgotten. And today, in an ironic twist, the latter is