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Gujarat cadre to HDFC: When bureaucratic style hits corporate walls

Rajiv Shah |
I was a little amused by the abrupt March 17 resignation of Atanu Chakraborty—a Gujarat cadre IAS officer of the 1985 batch who retired in 2020—as chairman of HDFC Bank. Much of what may have led to his decision to quit this ostensibly high post—actually a non-executive, part-time role—is by now well known. I followed most of it online with considerable interest, partly because I had interacted with him umpteen times during my stint as The Times of India correspondent in Gandhinagar from 1997 to 2012.
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Recent posts

Did caste define taste? A Dalit official's take on Gujarat's food traditions

Rajiv Shah |
Following  my recent blog on Dalit cuisine —where I argued, citing several studies, that it is deeply shaped by the caste system and the history of untouchability—I received an intriguing response on a private WhatsApp chat from a retired Gujarat-cadre bureaucrat. A likeable and thoughtful official, I have known him since the early 2000s, when I was covering the Gujarat Sachivalaya for The Times of India.
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Plastic, politics, and the cow: Congress’s 'misplaced priorities' in Gujarat

Rajiv Shah |
“What has gone wrong with the Congress? Why is it making such stupid demands? That’s the only reason why none trusts the party,” exclaimed someone close to me after reading a Gujarati daily report that the Congress had demanded the cow be declared India’s national animal.  
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Beyond sattvik: Purity, caste and the politics of the Indian kitchen

Rajiv Shah |
  A few week ago, I was forwarded an article that  appeared  in the British weekly  The Economist . Titled “Caste and cuisine: From honeycomb curry to blood fry: India’s ‘untouchable’ cooking”, it took me back to what I had blogged about what was called a “ sattvik  food festival”, an annual event organised by former Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad professor Anil Gupta.
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Parental consent for marriage? Gujarat’s curious political consensus

Rajiv Shah |
  The other day, a discussion broke out among ten friends on love marriages—a contentious issue in Gujarat following moves in the corridors of power to regulate them by making parental consent mandatory. One of us claimed that, unlike in the past, nearly 70 percent of weddings today are love marriages. Another person, who had eloped to get married years ago, remarked, “Problems exist everywhere, whether it is a love marriage or an arranged one.”
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Was Netaji forced to alter face, die in obscurity in USSR in 1975? Was he so meek?

Rajiv Shah |
  This should sound almost hilarious. Not only did Subhas Chandra Bose not die in a plane crash in Taipei, nor was he the mysterious Gumnami Baba who reportedly passed away on 16 September 1985 in Ayodhya, but we are now told that he actually died in 1975—date unknown—“in oblivion” somewhere in the former Soviet Union. Which city? Moscow? No one seems to know.
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Remembering R.K. Misra: A 'news plumber' who refused to compromise

Rajiv Shah |
It is always sad when a journalist colleague passes away — more so when that person has remained firm in his journalistic moorings. Compared to many others, I did not know R.K. Misra, who passed away on February 23 after a long illness, very intimately, but we interacted occasionally over the years.
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Conversion laws and national identity: A Jesuit response response to Hindutva narrative

Rajiv Shah |
  By Rajiv Shah  A recent book, " Luminous Footprints: The Christian Impact on India ", authored by two Jesuit scholars,  Dr. Lancy Lobo  and  Dr. Denzil Fernandes , seeks to counter the current dominant narrative on  Indian Christians , which equates  evangelisation  with conversion, and education, health and the social services provided by Christians as meant to lure -- even force -- vulnerable sections into Christianity.
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A story Gujarat forgot: Dalits and the Dakor temple movement

Rajiv Shah |
The other day, I was talking with Martin Macwan, a well-known Gujarat Dalit rights leader. He revealed to me an interesting chapter of the Gandhian movement in Gujarat — how Ravishankar Maharaj (1884–1984), a prominent Gandhian social reformer of the state, played a pivotal role in the struggle for temple entry for Dalits (then referred to as Harijans) in the late 1940s.
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Old prejudice dies hard: Why the Left still doesn't trust NGOs

Rajiv Shah |
Decades ago, when I was a student at Delhi University, the Left-wing student organisations, one of which I was a part of, would hold a highly negative view of NGOs. They would go so far as to castigate them as imperialist or CIA agents -- just because they were foreign-funded, by bodies such as Amnesty, Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, and Greenpeace.
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