A letter to the Left Lal Salaam Comrades! Your tenure in government seems to have ended. How different things were four years ago! Four years ago you were faced with a unique opportunity. The "communal" BJP-led NDA had suffered a surprising electoral defeat. The "secular" UPA was to take over the reins of government. In a hung house, you with your 60 MPs formed the crucial outside support to the government. At that time you smiled broadly with your hands held aloft with other leaders of the UPA. You delivered sharp soundbites on the Common Minimum Programme, on the basis of which you gave your support. With your best ever electoral performance, it seemed as if the Communists had finally arrived on India's national stage. Today, four years later, where are you? The Congress government is getting ready to survive its remaining few months in power without you. Prakash Karat's dream of the "non Congress" "non BJP" Third Front lies in...

A courageous newspaper editor, whose commitment to his home state of Maharashtra has never been in doubt was attacked last week at his home by fellow Maharashtrians. His windows were broken, his doorway was tarred and stones were hurled into his rooms. All for writing an editorial suggesting that the glory of Maharashtra cannot be achieved by the proposed plan to build an expensive 309-foot tall statue of Shivaji in the Arabian Sea. Instead, the editor wrote, the government should provide jobs and alleviate farmers' misery. For writing this Kumar Ketkar was attacked by thugs from a little known group called the Shiv Sangram Sangathan. Alas, Ketkar should have known better. He should have known that in India statues are holy cows to be worshipped. Ketkar was writing about life, but our politics is increasingly about death. Death that is celebrated, death that is as cold and as sterile, as a mere statue. Two years ago an alleged drunk committed the cardinal...

When Kareena Kapoor attained "size sero", there were fears of an apocalypse of suicidal dieting among young Indian women. Instead our level-headed behenji brigade (with the exception of a few airheads) said they-and their gentlemen- preferred breasty and curvy instead. While the ravages of anorexia and heroin chic blitzkrieg through Western womanhood, Kareena Kapoor's dietician, confirmed that her thin-ness had been achieved not by heroin but by eating aloo paratha and paneer. Thin for us desis has never meant self-destruction. Instead, when the Indian woman gets thin, more often than not, she's still managed to sneak in a little bit of paapri chaat. India is never far away from our west-inspired fitness. At weddings, birthdays, award ceremonies and anniversaries, the sari has never been more chic. The blouses may show off swathes of pretty alabaster backs, necklines may plunge, cutaway sleeves might display newly waxed arms. But the good old nine yards, twisted and pleated to perfection, as sexy and as subtle, as wicked...

Ah, the great Indian city! The lack of urban infrastructure destroying the infrastructure of the human soul. By 2020 Mumbai will have a population of 20 million. Bangalore, already with 6.5 million inhabitants has seen phenomenal growth. 300 million Indians live in urban areas; the figure will spurt by 40 per cent in the next 11 years. Whatever the rural romantics may say, India's future is irreversibly urban. Mumbai and Bangalore are symbols of the urban Indian dream, the first, whose present chief minister claims will be a new Shanghai, the second, which a former chief minister wanted to make into another Singapore. But forget Shanghai and Singapore, which instead are the voices that are speaking the loudest for the Indian city? The new voices that are yelling into the urban skyline are anything but urbane or metropolitan. In Mumbai, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray has declared war on north Indians, mimicking what he calls their strange accents, noisy pujas, nasty...