Last month I had written about my short, three-month sojourn at the University of Cambridge in 1983. I had gone there to write a paper on the Latin American debt crisis. Six years later I applied to, and was invited by, Queen Elizabeth House (QEH) in Oxford. I was to spend a
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Four decades ago, I won a journalism fellowship at the Cambridge University in the UK. It was for just three months, for what they call the Michaelmas Term there. The college was Wolfson and it had a couple of Pakistani civil servants too. They were from the Pakistani equivalent of our
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All houses everywhere need to be repainted from time to time. But in India the problem is more acute because of our climatic conditions. Northern and central India have an excess of dust that turns the walls brown. Regions in southern, western and eastern India have an excess of humidity that
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Indians have a peculiar failing. Not all, of course, but enough of them to make you notice it. I am referring to that sense of entitlement that comes from status, whether inherited or acquired. Coming as I do from a family of bureaucrats and with a large group of friends who were
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For the last two weeks I have been travelling in Western Europe, which is supposed to comprise developed countries. Economists and others use all sorts of fancy criteria like per capita income, hospital beds and doctors per capita, schools and teachers per capita, etc to judge if a country is developed
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Since I was 16 years old I have been a student of, and involved in, economics and my involvement with the subject is now 55 years old. My first job after my MA was as the Economics Editor in a large British publishing house. After a few years I got bored
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Gift-giving has always posed an insurmountable problem for me. When I first acquired a girlfriend about half a century ago, at the age of 24, I was amazed at how she could give different people different gifts which never failed to please them enormously. Mine, in contrast, evoked a mere thanks.
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When the French Open ended this year someone asked me if I had watched the matches. I said no because I think the French Open, which is played on clay, is more a test of endurance than tennis skills. Opinions vary on this but I also think the bigger culprit, or
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This is an appeal to all the members of this august body. For the last three decades everyone has been talking about all kinds of pollution. Air. Seas. Rivers. Forests. Land. You name it, they have all been a matter of what they call “deep concern”. No one, however, talks about
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There used to be a time, a few decades ago, when most people saw a movie three or four times a year. This was because choice was very limited. People saw mostly movies with top class stars in them, never mind how bad those films were. But, on the plus side,
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Let me apologise to the readers at the very outset for the angry tone of this article. But the truth is that I am angry. Anyone would be at the sheer callousness of our successive governments since the late 1950s. Let me explain. All my life I have lived in North
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