A professor in formal attire, driving his own Beetle to the sprawling Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus and turning up in class to “open up visions of his students” — that’s how Bengal finance minister Asim Dasgupta remembers his teacher, Paul A. Samuelson. Samuelson, who helped form the basis of modern economics, died yesterday at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, after a brief illness. He was 94. “He was a...

The near total political paralysis of one of India's largest states, Andhra Pradesh, over its proposed carve-up, raises fresh questions about how the world's largest democracy will handle questions of identity and territory in this young century. Telangana, the new state proposed, is not a fresh demand, but even as it seems closer than ever to materialising, it opens a Pandora's box in a vast country of over a billion...

For generations of China watchers, Mira Sinha Bhattacharjea was an objective interpreter of the tumultuous events which unfolded in the Peoples’ Republic.  Mira Sinha Bhattacharjea was one of the world’s leading scholars on China, a political scientist who skirted the minefield that her subject’s often fraught relations with India laid before her peers with integrity, wit and an objectivity of consideration rare in the field of Sinology. Taking to academia at...

In his engaging book on a love affair between a Hyderabadi princess and an Englishman in the 18th century, William Dalrymple reminds us that “the road from Hyderabad to the port of Masulipatam was one of the most beautiful in the Deccan”. In unearthing this fact from travelogues of the time, Dalrymple draws attention not just to the wealth of Hyderabad, inherited from the richest kingdom of the Deccan, Golconda,...

Introduction The phenomenon of disability is one of the pressing problems in the world. According to the projections of international agencies, about 10 per cent of the population are affected with physical, mental, sensory and other forms of impairments and around 75 per cent of the disabled population are concentrated in the rural and inaccessible areas of the developing societies. This data is based on recent studies carried out in various...