Is there anything any one can say after Gajendra Singh's suicide that will not come across as inadequate, insincere, fatuous or too little too late? Already the spokespeople of the three parties most interviewed on TV have begun to sound shrill, opportunistic and hopelessly self-serving as they indulge in a blame game or try and score brownie points against each other.A man has died in front of our eyes, before thousands of people, TV cameras and national leaders and the keepers of the law. His death was not sudden or unexpected. He clambered up a tree, sat there for close to three hours, thinking God knows what kind of thoughts, no one stopped him or tried to persuade him to come down or reasoned with him or showed him some empathy - not the leaders, the police, the spectators or the journalists present.We saw it happen again and again on a hundred replays. The death of an Indian farmer who'd climbed up a tree to draw attention to his plight: Unseasonal rains, crop destruction, unserv

The point of no return

Business Standard

One man's vacation is another man's enigma

Rahul's Eat, Pray, Love moment

VK Singh might have shot his mouth off and bitten off more than he could chew by punning on Twitter that has brought anguish to more of its users than can be counted. But did that warrant such outrage?

Sticks and stones

Friends of Vinod Mehta came together to remember the man and his legacy

The man and the editor

In the throes of Lakme Fashion Week 2015 in Mumbai, I find myself thinking of how an enduring brand property can be created out of virtually nothing. When the bi-annual fashion event was launched back in 1999, even the most progressive amongst us were sceptical.Indian fashion till then had been regarded as the purview of the colourfully crazy but temperamental designers, vain women and bored housewives. Lakme, on the other hand, was that dowdy but worthy Tata subsidiary, launched in the wake of nationalist fervour in 1952 - when, concerned that Indian women were wasting too much foreign exchange buying imported cosmetics, the then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru requested JRD Tata to start an indigenous manufacturer. (HLL would acquire it in 1996).Until then, no one in India had made the connection between fashion and cosmetics - certainly not frumpy (but well made, nevertheless) cosmetics named after the Goddess Lakshmi or a French opera star, depending on which story you believed.At

Fashion's best foot forward

AIB ban. Beef ban. Nirbahya documentary ban. Satanic Verses ban. India by Katherine Mayo ban, The Ramayana as told by Aubrey Menen ban

Of bandhs, bans and cancelled tours

On Wednesday, I found myself moderating a panel discussion for the Indian Merchants' Chamber's Ladies Wing for its International Women's Day Conclave. The panel discussion was titled "Impact of films, education, business, law, media and theatre as powerful tools for women's empowerment". Featuring many influential men and women from the aforementioned fields and with an audience comprising some of the city's best-placed women and men, I saw a venue full of women of education, consequence, influence and privilege from the stage.Indeed, among the four women and two men on stage, there was not one who did not believe in gender equality, women's empowerment and reform of the existing laws. We might have quibbled over the methodology, and, indeed, we might even have had different levels of commitment to gender equality, but these were only a matter of detail. Our stated consensus was that women were equal to men.So why was it that seated there on the stage, that afternoon, I began to feel t

Caught between platitudes and mindsets

After the Kejriwal sweep, Modi appears a man chastened. He has taken to wearing sober clothes, the famous "power walk" has been toned down, and even his radio chats reveal a vulnerable side

The emperor has one suit less

A recent exchange between two friends on Facebook got me thinking about the word "establishment". Challenged to describe the establishment in India's capital, one of my friends had drawn up a list that, to my great surprise, very closely matched my own.On the list of people who constitute the power and influence wielders of New Delhi were publishers of journals, editors of newspapers, hostesses of salons, cultural czars and czarinas, industrialists and professional keepers of the city's soul: judges, lawyers, bureaucrats and medical practitioners. Could it be that the names on this so-called claque of the powerful and influential was so widely accepted as to be almost consensual?Now, if this were true of Delhi, would the same yardstick apply to other cities? Would Mumbai's establishment be formed of more or less the usual suspects too? I began to draw up my own list of Mumbai's wielders of influence and power, the men and women who were the arbiters of taste, authority and impact in th

The unchanging face of the establishment

You realise that being in the billionaires' club comes with its own baggage. You have to live up to other people's assumption of what you ought to be

Who wants to be a billionaire?

By the end of the '80s, Manmohan Shetty was running the largest film processing laboratory in the country with top production houses like Yash Raj Films as his clients

The game changer

Recently a photograph of a dozen or so of India's corporate statesmen lining up like schoolkids in a class to meet the new teacher ricocheted around the Internet

Toadyism or survival tactic?

Is Jayanthi Natarajan a victim of Rahul Gandhi's 'shift' from being pro-poor to pro-industry?

North versus the rest

Going by the amount of people crawling out of the woodwork and claiming to have been recipients of poor Sunanda Pushkar's final confidences, the troubled former minister's wife seems to have had spent most of her time crying on people's shoulders.There they are on television, recounting those moments of her despair and disquiet when she unloaded a series of revelations on them, ranging from her husband's alleged infidelity to her own supposed fragile health and her misperceived role in the Indian Premier League.Of course, these many and varied recounts are all lapped up by an eager media and public,   and may even assist the authorities with insights into the unsolved mystery of her murder.However they beg the question: what did these worthies do at the time that they were faced with their friend's anguish?Listening to a troubled friend, of course, is an important requisite to their healing, but these were powerful, resourceful people, well connected and famously blessed with worldline

The city of whispering walls

Three dastardly terrorist attacks over the festive season and the soul has got weary of their stomach-churning regularity.When the bullets fell on the hapless students in Peshawar, I found myself responding in a hitherto unknown way. I did not watch the endless reruns on TV, couldn't get myself to click on the links to the episode on the Net and tried to avoid reading about it in the papers.I did this because I did not want to be manipulated by the perpetrators of the crime into feeling the things they wanted me to feel: fear, outrage, hostility, grief or hatred. But also because I knew that if I saw the gunned and maimed children I would be moved to write eloquently and passionately about what had happened and I did not want to allow myself the luxury of such a response.It would be too easy, to express anger and sadness, to denounce and to blame., to question and to pontificate.Sitting so many miles away, safe in my cocoon, affording myself the luxury of empathy, I felt would be an in

Empathy fatigue

Their voices amplified by the social media, the chatterati were at their cattiest best in 2014, commenting endlessly on things big and small

The talk of the  town: Conversations in the social circles in 2014

Iguess the nicest thing you could say about 2014 is that it is getting over. Seriously, a year that saw eerily mystifying phenomena (like the missing MH 370), compounded by freaky coincidence (the shooting down over eastern Ukraine a few months later of another Malaysia Airlines flight flight killing 298 people), easily earns for itself the title of annus horribilis.It was, after all, a year when both the Ebola virus and the ISIS raised their ugly heads and claimed many innocent lives; when terms like "ghar wapasi" and "love jihad' blighted the vocabulary of ordinary Indians and when viewers were subjected to such virtuoso performances on prime time TV debates as Americai Narayan's "hell yeah", Subramanian Swamy's "liar liar" and Robert Vadra resembling Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver with "Are you serious?"It was also the year that proved that violence against women is an equal opportunity affront with no one being spared - neither the well-heeled female professionals who hired Ubers in

Goodbye and good luck

I'd like to believe that Pakistani and Indian women facing each other on the subject of terror could make a differenceMany years ago, I was witness to a curious spectacle. At a party in Mumbai,  attended by Indians and Pakistanis, many of whom had been friends and who had attended the same colleges and belonged to the same social circles in Europe and West Asia. An evening that had begun as a pantomime of exquisite tehzeeb and exaggerated courtesy and then had very rapidly degenerated into one of extreme hostility and acrimony.Perhaps the clutch of assembled Pakistani grandees had gone too far with their Gandhi jokes, perhaps their Indian counterparts had been too quick to take offence. Perhaps the unlimited supply of J&B being quaffed back  with equal zest by both groups had been the match that had lit the heady fuel - but before any one knew, it had almost come close to blows with some perfectly sane men saying pretty insane things to each other.The women present had not seen it

Bells toll for children on both sides

The social media allows you to belong to a community by sharing conversations

A sense of belonging on WhatsApp

Murli Deora's funeral reflected the way he lived a bipartisan political life

A fine legacy indeed

Not only did Alia Bhatt take the wind out of the sails of her detractors by sending herself up with great style - she proved just how smart she was by doing so, thus re-casting herself as not only smart but also cool

Malavika Sangghvi