The data show that rural families simply cannot subsist on farm incomes alone There must be a bit of Gandhi in all of us because often our idea of India ultimately boils down to the kisan as the standard bearer of the lakhs of villages that comprise India. Perhaps that is why I tend to look for the signs of transformation in the lives of Indian farmers. The changes in...

Iqbal Masud, the civil servant and critic, supported the ban on The Satanic Verses in 1989. His reason was simple: if the book remained on sale in India, Muslims would march in protest, policemen would fire upon them, some of them would die, and no book, said Masud, was worth the life of a single protester. There were, he allowed, legitimate arguments to be made about incitement, about mobs marching against...

Liquor baron Ponty Chadha’s mercurial rise is all ‘Maya’ A reclusive liquor baron may seem like an anomaly in these never-ending good times. But Gurdeep Singh Chadha—better known by the moniker Ponty Chadha—fits the bill. Often called “Mayawati’s financier”, the 57-year-old Ponty has been making large (if silent) waves for the political patronage he enjoys in Uttar Pradesh. Any bottle of liquor sold in India’s most populous state goes through his...

-The Economic Times   The Bombay High Court has ordered Filmmaker Subhash Ghai to return to Maharashtra government 20-acres allotted for his Film institute. The court indicted Union science and technology minister Vilasrao Deshmukh for "misusing his official position" as chief minister by showing "undue favours" to Ghai. However, the court said there was no need for a CBI probe into the land deal since there was no material to indicate that its...

In a dark anteroom of the Presidency University canteen here, a handful of students huddled around a screen on Wednesday watching Jashn-e-Azadi , Sanjay Kak's 2007 documentary on Kashmir that was not allowed to be screened at the Symbiosis College of Arts and Commerce in Pune earlier this week.  While the walls of the canteen are littered with graffiti — political and otherwise — not a single poster was put up...