Page 7 - Sunil Sethi/@sunilsethibooks

IAS: guardians or palace guards?

Some suffer for standing up to political pressure and others because they were openly complicit in political corruption

Chandigarh's shopping mall complex

Chandigarh's shopping mall complex is so acute it seems to overwhelm a richer past

Bihar and India's uncertain glory

Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze advocate stronger laws to improve basic education but believe that public scepticism and media criticism of corruption in such schemes are misplaced

Uttarakhand's landslide defeat

Uttarakhand's tragedy confirms the view of humanitarian aid as a political weapon

No country for young men

New Delhi's political space is surprisingly empty of young leaders eager to compel attention or lead from the front

How N Srinivasan plays the game

Srinivasan is simply the biggest contractor in the sports business, with limitless powers of purchase

Do famous books make great movies?

The power of the novels The Great Gatsby and The Reluctant Fundamentalist is in their brevity, but what is unsaid - left to the reader's imagination - is possibly what attracts film makers to them

Can you un-cage a pet parrot?

If a parrot is tamed over a long period, it loses its bite and the habit of stretching its wings. The CBI's feathers were trimmed from the start, its beak trained to give friendly pecks to its masters

Help yourself to get filthy rich

With the cunning of a master thief, Mohsin Hamid in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia has stolen the form of a self-improvement guide with chapter heads that alternate between the mundane and the

Were two 'Iron Ladies' too many?

Equally admired and loathed, both Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher have been so often memorialised in biography, novels and film that it's difficult to separate fact from fiction

Fishing in troubled waters

Against a background of chronic political and economic instability in Italy, the marines have acquired a mythic status

Shades of old Lucknow

If you want a whiff of old Lucknow, you could turn a corner at Qaisar Bagh and enter the gracefully restored home of filmmaker, artist and musical impresario Muzaffar Ali

Sunil Sethi: Smelling a rat on the train

Railway catering was reputedly among the most reliable in the public sector. The trouble has arisen with corporate culture seeping into the government monolith

Sunil Sethi: The olive oil factor

Sunil Sethi: Republic of bad ideas

Change no longer creeps up slowly, it comes on fast in the digital age, when film-goers in Tamil Nadu can log on to see Vishwaroopam

Sunil Sethi: The power of one

What you now have is a fiercely vocal, socially conscious, demanding population that finds slow administrative and political responses intolerable

Sunil Sethi: ...And two steps backward

Country watchers in both India and Pakistan recognise the swampy terrain of the Slough of Despond ahead. It's no-visa season again

Sunil Sethi: People of no fixed address

Are these people expected to return to their villages and hometowns to hang around waiting for the Unique Identification Authority of India to set up shop?

Sunil Sethi: The best bookshelf of 2012

As non-fiction writers increasingly employ the fiction writer's inventive art to tell stories, some of the most compelling, bestselling titles of 2012 are non-fiction

Sunil Sethi: What hope and change can mean

Mr Obama¿s return endorses that an image of sincerity and integrity, a hard-won effort to overcome policy failure, matters more than political parentage