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Seventy years after Nehru’s beautiful midnight speech – ‘Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny…’ – in Indian cities and villages millions survive on less than the bare minimum. Children are not in classrooms, women have nowhere safe to relieve themselves, and jobless men lie around in a daze. In cities, where initiative should flourish, a merciless state looms large over every common endeavour. The civilization that was ...
The intriguing title of this book derives from a crowded stretch of the highway from Mumbai’s airport into the city where a series of concrete lollipops have been constructed to serve as advertising billboards: a wasted aesthetic gesture—and an expensive one—to make in an expanse of slum. Our politicians have a gift for the useless gesture, and these lollipops serve as a metaphor for many others that have been offered to gullible voters since independence. ...
From 1987, when Tavleen Singh began writing her column in the Indian Express, to now, twenty years later, has been a long journey. That was, in retrospect, the age of innocence, as Rajiv Gandhi took the first tentative steps towards opening up the economy, and people began to experience the novelty of being able to make a telephone call anywhere without having to wait. Some years later, the move towards liberalization, driven by a foreign exchange crisis, became ...