Category: Books

  The Congress Manifesto for the 1967 General Election was prepared by a team with which I was entrusted the job of the final copy and bringing it out of the press. The brains behind this manifesto were Atulya Ghosh (the then Congress party Treasurer) and Saddiq Ali (General Secretary) and assisted by two Delhi…

  This book was composed in the year 1984 and contains autobiographical recollections of my years at Oxford. The other essays deal with my educational activities and experiences. One article sums up my establishment of a secondary school in a remote village in the South of India. There are also articles summing up my visits…

New Books on India and the Western domination The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain by Nicholas Dirks The British Empire and the Second World War by Ashley Jackson Published by Hambledon Continuum Harvard University Press The History of British Empire by Niall Ferguson The War of the World: History’s Age…

His daughter’s writings reveal unknown facts! Thangammal Bharati Padaipukal Centenary publication, Amudhasurabi,  Chennai,2004 pages 472, Price Rs.200. Mahakavi Bharati’s  poetry is well-established. Not only in Tamil but  at the all India level. Quoted and written about in all Indian languages. He lived only 39 years. He also wrote much that was traditional. What makes Bharati…

Heard of Spectator? Perhaps not. This is a famous English weekly magazine I have been reading, almost all my life. This magazine is not available in India, I read it regularly in the British Council library whenever I visit it, be it in Chennai or in Bangalore or wherever I find myself. Even when I…

Shameful Flight, The Last Years of the British Empire in India,pp 231,OUP, 2006, where historic photos mislead us! India’s Partition and why we feel shy to avoid the topic? This book by a serious scholar of India’s modern history, an authoritative writer on Gandhi and Jinnah has now produced a book that would give us,…

Buy more foreign magazines for libraries! Free speech, free press? Good questions, good rhetoric. Somehow, there are obstacles in India too much! Citizens empowerment is a concept that had not received the attention of our politicians. Our people must be enabled to read more good books,read more latest serious foreign journals.That is the only way…

I have been reading Bertrand Russell all through my life. I started with his” Problems of Philosophy”, sometime in the Fifties, on the suggestion of a friend who said” that might be useful for your exam for Oxford”. That was at a time when the Oxford College (New College) asked me to do some essays…