Modi

In the 1892 short story “Kabuliwala” (the man from Kabul) by Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, a dry fruit vendor from the capital of Afghanistan develops a tender friendship with a little girl in Calcutta. The vendor is then…

This thought has been brewing in the corridors of power at Raisina Hill these days. Diplomats whisper about it, while at least one prominent not-for-profit India Foundation, which counts two sitting cabinet ministers as mentors, has started…

There is a famous (and infamous) word in India: jugaad. In Hindi, it roughly means “to make do”. While this jugaad attitude has been celebrated as the Indian spirit of “frugal engineering”, it also exemplifies the poor quality of goods made…

The new Indian Prime Minister is from the western Indian state of Gujarat, which is famed for churning out the country’s sharpest businessmen. Banking is something Narendra Modi instinctively understands. But in March, when his government…

In October, little noticed by journalists in India and abroad, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of India’s ruling political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), declared that it was celebrating the 1,000th…