Panorama

Shashi Shekhar The first Sunday of November brought with it an ominous air for Delhi-NCR. In the morning, I found there was no sunlight beyond the window panes of the bedroom. An impenetrable cover of dust was all around. Was it fog? No. The air was laden with poisonous particles which were choking people. This was the morning of the …

TENSING RODRIGUES Central to our idea of brahman is their ethnicity; not their ‘varn’ (caste), not their ‘karm’ (occupation), nor any other attribute that may be conventionally attached to that term. The ethnicity obviously has a geographical connotation. When we say that a certain group is brahman, it implies that the group derives its origin from a people who migrated …

Mark Tully The better-than-expected performance of the Congress in Haryana, and of both the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party in Maharashtra, has led commentators to declare that their brand is not beyond its sell-by date. After the disastrous performance of both parties in the general election, it was widely assumed that voters were no longer attracted to the Congress. …

Despite the explosion of productivity apps, there are many who still prefer planning on paper with the help of journals Manoj Sharma In the last week of December last year, Archana Singh bought, as she does every year, a new page-a-day format paper planner, one with a pink ribbon as a marker, pop art on the cover, neatly laid out …

Agatha Christie’s first novel is almost 100 years old. Poison played a role in it, and in her later works too Paramita Ghosh The 1920s were the right time for quiet murders in the English countryside. These were the Inter-war years. New chemicals and their compounds were being discovered in laboratories, to be used as weapons, and were making their …

Frederick Noronha Some people promote themselves. Others do a little to make their work visible. There are still others who feel embarrassed about talking of their work. Bonaventure D’Pietro clearly belongs to the last category. A small-built man, a quiet type and a most modest personality, D’Pietro, his preferred nome d’plume though born as Boaventura Pedro Fernandes, was the kind …

Gopalkrishna Gandhi Now that the Supreme Court has decided that the Ram temple will be built on the Ayodhya site, and a mosque is to come up on an alternative site of five acres in “a prominent place” in Ayodhya, the right thing to do is what S Radhakrishnan advised: dirgham pasyatu, ma hrasvam (Look far ahead, be not shortsighted). …

Maneka Sanjay Gandhi I have just returned from an amazing assembly of a 100 very special people with visionary ideas, inventions and research who gathered at the request of Alexander and Nicole Gratovsky at Delphi, Greece. The Gratovskys are Russian anthropologists who are using their wealth to explore the nature of consciousness and the purpose of mindfulness. They believe, on …

Shalini Gupta For someone who has been counselling runners and sportspersons for a decade, Divya Parashar once herself battled with a host of medical conditions like obesity, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance. A PhD in rehabilitation psychology from the University of Wisconsin, Delhi-based Parashar took to running in 2009 to maintain fitness. Initially training to run …

Amrit Mathur Searching for answers to challenges threatening it, cricket’s different formats are looking to reboot, upgrade, innovate and reinvent. Test cricket, in commercial ICU for some time, needs a major makeover. Following others, India has accepted night games hoping the change in ball colour will ensure cricket’s purest form remains in the pink of health. A late afternoon start …