One of the more joyous moments of fatherhood was taking my son, then all of nine years, to watch an India-Pakistan One-Day match in Lahore in 2004. Our Pakistani friends had rolled out the traditional Punjabi hospitality: from the waiting limousine at the airport to the best pavilion seats, we were treated as honoured guests. In a sea of competing blue and green, my son was caught up in the excitement of the occasion. Through the day, he had been furiously waving the Tricolor. In the last overs, as it became clear that Team India was winning, some of the visibly frustrated Pakistani supporters handed over a Pakistani flag to my son. The offer was promptly accepted, and on our way home my son had two flags in his hand: the Tricolor and its Pakistani equivalent. Call it the innocence of a nine-year-old, but the Indo-Pak equation has always had a romantic edge. No relationship has been as peculiarly schizophrenic as that between the...

Times change, politicians don't, voters do. Rewind to 1984 and the ad campaign that became the signature of the Congress's election appeal then: scorpions, snakes and barbed wires, Indians were warned of the dangers of "Sikh terrorism" in the aftermath of the assassination of Indira Gandhi, in a direct stereotyping of an entire community. Twenty four years later, the blood-soaked images were back again, only this time it was the BJP which was hoping to climb to power on the back of the frightening images of 26/11. In 1984, the Congress won a three-fourths majority in the Lok Sabha. In 2008, the BJP lost Delhi, the city which went to the polls less than 72 hours after the Mumbai terror attack, and Rajasthan which voted a week later. What has changed between then and now? Why hasn't terror worked as a vote-catching issue this time? Many complex explanations have been offered, but simply put: the Indian voter has grown up. In...

Dear Reader, forgive my self-indulgence, but I write this as an angry and anguished Indian citizen and south Mumbaikar as much as a professional journalist. Over the last few days, as I have watched the city of my youth being ravaged by mindless terror, I must confess to feeling helpless, almost violated, as if someone had defiled the shrine of an old unhurried, SAFE Bombay. Each terror site ignites a flash of memories, the roll call of the dead consist of names I grew up with. In the geography of terror, the horror has come precariously close to home: my mother lives just a block away from Nariman House in Colaba, an area that has been traditionally the most secure in the metropolis. Its almost as if in the space of 72 bloody hours, an entire universe of memories has been shaken, perhaps irretrievably. Leopolds Café where I had my first beer in celebration of clearing the high school exam; Colaba market, where...

In the first innings of the Nagpur test, as Saurav Ganguly was batting with remarkable assurance, an excited senior government official rang up: "You guys in the media have to start a campaign to stop Ganguly from retiring. We can't let Dada go like this when he is batting like a champion!" In this season of high-pitched cricketing emotion, there has been no farewell quite as dramatic as that of Saurav "Dada" Ganguly. As reams are written, songs are composed and television images of a bare-bodied Ganguly are endlessly beamed, it's almost as if his departure from international cricket has become the final episode of a long-running soap that has captivated a nation for thirteen tumultuous years. Anil Kumble, a giant of a cricketer with over 600 wickets, retired after the Delhi test. His exit was like the man himself: dignified and somber. Ganguly's exit, by contrast, has been accompanied by the kind of frenzied fan response never seen before on...