‘The Sikh Next Door’: A rich study of a complex community as it grows in space, time, representation
While reading The Sikh Next Door: An Identity in Transition, three incidents sprang to mind. A quarter of a century ago, I was walking...
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All Writings
May 5, 20235 min read
A Passage to India
AMBASSADORS, CONTRARY TO general opinion, can often lead fraught lives. Behind the curtain of glamour and ceremony, they are constantly...
Sep 1, 20226 min read
Cauldron of Conflicts | West Asia at War
The Middle East – or West Asia, depending on where one sits – is the cradle of civilisations, the birthplace of three major religions,...
May 3, 20203 min read
The Mirror and the Light | The Week
Beheadings at the Tower of London seem to have been the bread and butter of medieval England. Thomas Cromwell is thinking of his...
Mar 22, 20203 min read
Dreams and a carnival
The Jaipur Literary Festival is often called a mela, usually by people who haven’t been able to attend it that year. There’s something to...
Jan 5, 20203 min read
Grey is the Colour of Ash
November 1984 will remain one of the darkest chapters in the history of free India. More than 3,000 innocent Sikhs were murdered on the...
Jan 2, 20202 min read
Trumped – Emerging Powers in a Post-American World | USIofIndia
President Trump’s recent visit to India has been described as “a visit like no other.” The metaphor could be extended to say that Trump...
Dec 12, 20193 min read
Sikh heritage brought to life in 229 great photos | Asian Age
Heritage, as this beautifully produced book defines, is “the entire collection of quantifiable symbols handed on by the past to each...
Aug 10, 20194 min read
A moving target | The Patient Assassin
Book: The Patient Assassin Author: Anita Anand Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pages: 384 pages Price: 599 On July 31, 1940, Udham Singh, the...
Jun 15, 20193 min read
The Camel Merchant of Philadelphia
An upscale bed and breakfast place in fashionable Saint Tropez, France, was once the estate of Jean Francois Allard and his wife, the...
May 27, 20191 min read
Sing The Wrath Of Punjab
A great narrative poem of a Jallianwala Bagh massacre survivor, and lost for long, is finally translated. It retains the cadences of this...
May 25, 20194 min read
Abandoned at Sea | Voices of Komagata Maru
In September 1914, the German cruiser Emden, with remarkable stealth, appeared at the mouth of the Hooghly and destroyed five English...
May 17, 20194 min read
Inexcusable disgrace
Some events – the massacre at Wounded Knee, the Soweto shootings, the suppression of the Mau Mau – die slowly in the memory of nations,...
Aug 31, 20186 min read
What did the British achieve in a century in India? | Financial Times
Seventy-one years on since the union flag came down on the Indian sub-continent, the debate about whether the Raj only pillaged and...
Sep 1, 20173 min read
A Life of Adventure and Delight | Financial Times
Akhil Sharma only recently accepted, on purely political grounds, the mantle of an immigrant writer. His reluctance to get boxed in,...
Sep 26, 20161 min read
Speak, Yesterday’s People
Alexievich’s visceral first-person accounts from the last days of the USSR are saturated with anger, longing and hope. Read full review...
Jan 25, 20154 min read
Sophia a Biography | India Today
The story of Maharaja Duleep Singh, a victim of his strange destiny and Machiavellian imperial manipulations, is among the most poignant...
Nov 22, 20144 min read
99 Khushwant Singh | All that remains | Indian Express
Khushwant Singh did not believe that much remains of man after death, favouring Omar Khayyam’s attitude: Some talk awhile of Thee and Me/...
Aug 5, 20102 min read
No Way Home | Outlook India
The tumultuous events of 1984 can, and certainly will, provide an emotionally-charged setting for many a novel. But the traumatic...
Mar 8, 20092 min read
Book of Songs
Four decades ago,Khushwant Singh did a signal service to Sikhism by writing his classic two-volume History of the Sikhs, a work that has...
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