Bharati being felicitated by Ela Bhatt Founded by Mahatma Gandhi a hundred years ago, Gujarat Vidyapeeth was in news recently for allowing police to enter the campus for the first time ever. The occasion was, some Vidyapeeth students were identified flying objectionable kites on the Makarsankranti day, January 14. The ire was against those who were flying kites printed with anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), anti-National Register of Citizenship (NRC) slogans – a “seditious act” from current standards!

Rahul Bajaj In a sharply-worded commentary titled “India is facing twin economic and political crises”, the top British daily “Financial Times” has noted that while India’s growth slowdown has been dramatic, its politics is taking “an aggressively illiberal turn”. The author, Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator, who was in India last week, says, powerful people in the industry agreed with this state of affairs “if only privately”, because of the prevailing atmosphere of fear.

  Donald Trump left Ahmedabad for Agra to "enjoy" the Mughal monument Taj Mahel in the afternoon on Monday, leaving behind scores of huge billboards standing across the megacity showcasing larger than life images of the US president and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, some of them boldly captioned: “Two strong leaders of two strong democracies”.

More than a fortnight ago, prominent historian Ramchandra Guha, who calls himself Gandhi scholar and not a Gandhian, came to Ahmedabad. While I was part of a small group of persons who met him at lunch, his lecture on Gandhi in the evening, where he sought to interpret what swaraj meant to Gandhi, surely, interested the selected audience that had been called to listen to him.

It is called the Golden City of India. The raison d'être is simple: Virtually no houses in the 70,000-odd population of the small township are made of red bricks reinforced with cement. They are all constructed with yellow sandstone found in the nearby hilly tracks. One can go atop any house, not to talk of the hilltop fort, to fathom that it’s all yellow all the way, everywhere, including the beautiful hilltop Jain temples in the fort premises. Jain temples, we were told, aren’t coloured yellow anywhere, except here. Jaisalmer becomes a tourist attraction, starting November and ending mid-March, attracting foreigners and industrialists like Arvind Dubash, who  celebrated  his 50th “destination birthday” here with top Bollywood personalities such as Karan Johar. As part of a small family group, we also visited the city in the third week of January in a Rajasthan trip organized by one of the best known online agencies  MakeMyTrip  – a city about which I vaguely knew a...