RESEARCH

H is rationale is sound. And he has a way with words — he borrows the term “Californication” from the American comedy by that name to summarise Amartya Sen and Jen Drèze’s description of a liberalising India as “islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa” — which is remarkable, given that he went to-and-fro between electronic and print mediums of journalism, a transition the venerable Mark Tully famously did not find smooth. Hindol Sengupta in  Recasting India  depicts a country whose citizens have perhaps made more sense of freedom in the last two decades than what its politicians could muster. A member of the upwardly mobile middle class would be tempted to own it as his or her published title. Binding:  Paperback Publisher:  Palgrave Author:  Hindol Sengupta Released:  2014 Beginning with Dwarakanath Tagore, Gurudev Rabindranath’s grandfather who had interests in coal, tea, jute, sugar refining, newspapers and shipping, the author speaks of the rut th

T here are five different manners in which the RTI application from Jashodaben Modi, estranged wife of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, wanting to be assured of her safety, can be viewed: hypothetically, liberally, spiritually, historically and factually. None of the ways, as readers will see through this article, justifies the sudden advocacy by ‘social liberals’ (read detractors of Modi) that the prime minister must either accept Jashodaben in his family fold or divorce her — one of the two, normally accepted social conventions for partners in a couple. Hypothesis No way is Jashodaben in a position comparable to that of Indira Gandhi who had irked an entire community with her mishandling of the Punjab situation by first hobnobbing with Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and then sanctioning Operation Bluestar to let Army into the sanctum sanctorum of the Golden Temple of Amritsar. Invocation of the incident perpetrated by Mrs Gandhi’s bodyguards Satwant Singh and Beant