The Times of India

Of all the proposals I have heard to abolish poverty, the simplest comes from a friend in an NGO. Why not raise the minimum wage high enough to put everybody above the poverty line? It sounds so simple, elegant and […]

The monsoon is about to arrive, and people are anxiously scanning the skies. Two of the last three years have seen poor rains, and the drought last year was the worst for decades. How bad is the hunger caused by

I write this column from Afghanistan, about an ancient form of banking that has a sordid reputation in India but a splendid one in Kabul. In India, we regard hawala as criminal money-laundering. We think it uses crooked currency traders

We have always regarded our businessmen as crooks, and foreign companies as more trustworthy, warts and all. The stock markets have always given foreign companies higher valuations than comparable Indian ones, believing that foreign companies are less likely to cheat.

One of the many conspiracy theories about the Iraq war is that the US could not tolerate Saddam Hussein’s decision to designate his oil sales in euros, not dollars. To prevent other OPEC countries from also selling oil in euros,

Back in 1990, when Doordarshan had a TV monopoly, I wrote an article titled ‘Let a thousand TV channels bloom\’. That was considered pure fantasy at the time. Leftist colleagues like Praful Bidwai protested that private channels would be vehicles

When the Iraq war began, some drew parallels with the Vietnam war, some with the Afghanistan war of 2001, some with the Gulf War of 1991. In fact the best parallel is with the 1971 Indo-Pak war. That in turn

Many people interpret the Iraq war as part of a US plot to dominate the world through multinational corporations, some of whom are getting huge contracts to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure. The military industrial complex, it is said, has benefited enormously

I am shocked and awed. The Iraq war seems as good as over in just three weeks, half the length of the 1991 Gulf War. The US says it wants to set up a democracy in Iraq. That cannot be

Wars are prime time for hypocrisy. The bogus emotion and rhetoric displayed by pro-war factions is fully matched by that of anti-war factions, and bystanders. The prime hypocrite, of course, is the USA. Arab TV stations have broadcast pictures of