South Asia Citizens Web

We are now within two months of what may be humankind’s most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

ONE of the features of fascism is its invention of a golden past. The retrieval and projection of the mythical era into the future becomes the stated objective of its leaders to work their followers into a violent froth.

I grew up critical of Nehru and Indira. I was against the Emergency. I was criticised for that but never abused like I have been now. This is the nature of fascism. The man has the might of the corporate world behind him, and most of the media. Modi is a man who has no inner life. Nehru, our first prime minister, had an abundant inner life.

Fifty years ago this week, Duke Ellington and his band played in a concert he later called one of the most memorable of his life. The performance was in Kabul, in Afghanistan, and even though Ellington was at the height of his fame, almost all traces of it have been lost.

Mumbai was known as the Manchester of India and, more recently, the erstwhile “cottonopolis”. But by the mid-1990s, there were only 54 mills left, most taken over by the central government’s National Textile Corporation after falling irretrievably “sick”.