In my July 2002 column and the preface to the revised and abridged version of my 1988 book, The Hindu Equilibrium, I noted the astonishing post-modern turn in Indian history, whose canonical book Imagining India by RB Inden claimed that caste was an invention of the colonial British Raj. This ran contrary to the central theme of my book that the caste system arose in ancient India in the Indo...

Whenever I went missing as a child, my mother would come looking for me in the pata, Lalitabai Meshram said, laughing out loud. “My friends and I would play in the tangled vines for hours, making dolls of corn husk and hair, eating groundnuts, beans and waluk melon. Sometimes I would fall asleep there,” recalled Meshram, now 50-plus. Last year, after about four decades, she carved out a pata from...

“THE world’s attention is back on your cause.” That was Bill Gates talking to agricultural scientists gathered recently to honour the late Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution. The tycoon-turned-philanthropist was right. This week, the world—in the guise of 60-odd heads of state including the pope—held the first United Nations food summit since 2002. As the world’s attention turns from the receding financial crisis, it is switching to one...

ALAPPUZHA: The State government is contemplating distribution of rice at Rs.2 a kg to all agriculture workers irrespective of whether they hold Above Poverty Line or Below Poverty Line ration cards, Finance Minister T.M. Thomas Isaac has said. Inaugurating the State-level distribution of retirement benefits due from the Kerala State Farm Workers Welfare Fund to 1.84 lakh farm workers at a function at Nedumudi, near here, on Sunday, Dr. Isaac said...

IN 1974 Henry Kissinger, then America’s secretary of state, told the first world food conference in Rome that no child would go to bed hungry within ten years. Just over 35 years later, in the week of another United Nations food summit in Rome, 1 billion people will go to bed hungry. This failure, already dreadful, may soon get worse. None of the underlying agricultural problems which produced a spike in...