Blogs

When Bollywood tells true stories  It’s widely believed that cinema reflects life, all that’s happening outside the darkened auditorium. Quite true, if one’s to go by what one’s been watching in Bollywood in recent years. Take, for example, the Manoj Bajpayee-driven Governor: The Silent Saviour. This is an amazing effort to recreate India’s 1991 dilemma,…

I visit Pondicherry, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Matrimandir at Auroville and Ramanashram at Tiruvannamalai every year. As always, I stay at the ashram guest house at all these locations. These visits have become an integral part of my life, giving me an opportunity to reconnect with myself, experience the spiritual atmosphere of these sacred places, and spend time in the powerful aura of Sri…

The second anniversary (Aug 5, 2026) of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s forced ouster from governance and exile from the land of her birth has brought into focus two sharply contrasting images of Bangladesh. In New Delhi, where she now lives, Sheikh Hasina chose this day to publicly announce, through an audio address, her decision…

There is a particular cruelty in vindication that arrives 13 years late, because the temptation of a moment like this is to mistake relief for justice. On Aug 6, 2026, a division bench of the Bombay high court at Goa set aside the acquittal of Tarun Tejpal, former editor-in-chief of Tehelka, convicted him of aggravated…

A few days ago, I travelled to flood-affected villages in Sivasagar, Betbari, Ligiripukhuri, and Nepalikhuti. Coming from Chhaygaon in Kamrup district, floods have been part of my life since childhood. Floods do not end when the water goes away. They remain in damaged homes, fields buried under silt, lost livestock, and memories that refuse to…

It is well past midnight.The relentless rain has finally cooled the air, but instead of feeling good, an uneasiness has crept in. Will this lashing rain turn into a cloudburst? Will the neighbourhood become another waterway by dawn? Terrible August seems to be returning yet again. Eight years is long enough to determine whether an…

Our crumbling cities deserve memes & new names When heavy rain clouds appear over Indian cities, most people don’t feel excited. Instead, they worry. Will the roads flood? Will traffic come to a standstill? Will they get to school or work? Will someone get hurt by an open manhole or a loose electric wire? Many…

Paintings show how dogs humanise humans The earliest traces of a dog, or early canid, that walked in companionship alongside a human, are about 26,000 years old: pawprints in France’s Chauvet cave. Going thousands of years further back, dogs were, if you will, the first “proof of concept” – for Paleolithic humans – that domestication…

Our crumbling cities deserve memes & new names When dark rainclouds rumble, as they have for some days now, and it looks like the heavens may, indeed, fall, there’s hardly a resident in any Indian metro, Mumbai to Kolkata, Chennai to Delhi, Hyderabad to Gurgaon, who looks up in joy at the beautiful skies. Good…

By Sumit Paul Ten per cent of life is made up of what happens to you. Ninety per cent of life is decided by how you react. Most of the unpleasant incidents in life can be averted if we choose not to react. We often react because we mistakenly think that if we don’t, the…