I could weep for a river-valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don't know.

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.

The great irony is that people who live in remote areas, who are illiterate and don't own TVs, are in some ways more free because they are beyond the reach of indoctrination by the modern mass media.

I actually did a quick survey of how caste plays out in contemporary India. The idea that democracy and development have in some ways eroded caste turned out not to be the case, that it has in fact been entrenched and modernised.

Election campaigns seem to siphon away political anger and even basic political intelligence into this great vaudeville, after which we all end up in exactly the same place.

Some things come with their own punishments.

History is really a study of the future, not the past.