Outlook | November 1, 2004 In a way, the little book is a serious history of elections, and our ways with democracy. Talented cartoonists, like good doctors, are necessary to maintain the social health of a society. Unless we can laugh at ourselves, and not just in the park, we cannot be a stable people.…

Outlook | February 14, 2004 Privy to political intrigues and personalities’ quirks, this autobio is a say-some if not a say-all. A public servant rarely writes his autobiography because he is hoping to be recalled till his last day. I have seen ministers from Nehru’s days remaining silent for decades in the hope even of…

Outlook | February 9, 2004 A brave attempt to present 150 years of India’s social, political and cultural history through photographic images This is a brave attempt to present 150 years of India’s social, political and cultural history through photographic images. Images do linger for long in the national psyche but their overuse blunts the…

Outlook | December 29, 2003 Every graduate course prescribes a book of essays. This book deserves to be there. I once chanced upon Churchill’s Great Contemporaries. I read the essays again and again, always with profit and pleasure. Churchill’s prose and his perceptive observation of the great and famous, whom he saw at close range, surprised…

Outlook | April 28, 2003 The whole world uses fingerprinting, do they know the footprints lead to Nadia? Shakespeare said of rulers, “The evil lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” We love to talk of the wrongs done by the British. Yet it would be churlish not to accept their…

Outlook | April 7, 2003 In a well-researched book, Cheema resurrects the six major padshahs of the period 1707-1857. We all grew up on Mughal history. Babar, Ibrahim Lodi and Panipat; Akbar and Fatehpur Sikri; Shahjahan and the Taj; and, of course, the austere, pious but narrow-visioned Aurangzeb. This great drama was played out from…

For Outlook | June 25, 2001 Lives of an inimitable people, documented in inimitable Khushwant style If I am not mistaken, Khushwant and Raghu had done a small book on the Sikhs as an introductory primer long ago. This is a much more ambitious effort for the coffee tables, away from the Punjab, particularly beyond India.…