Number of words: 95 The prime minister told the army The general told his men, The colonel briefed his officers, And a major just asked “when”?. The captains ordered Sergeants, And the sergeants told the troops, And the soldiers picked their weapons up, Then jumped through all the hoops. The prime ministers praised the army, … Read more

Number of words: 2,754 Thank you for being here. And I say “thank you for being here” because I was silent for 17 years. And the first words that I spoke were in Washington, D.C., on the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. And my family and friends had gathered there to hear me speak. And … Read more

Number of words: 739 But then, having read his latest book, I actually know an awful lot about his diet. How he doesn’t eat sugar, any fruits which “don’t have a Greek or Hebrew name” or any liquid which is less than 1,000 years old. Just as I know that he doesn’t like air-conditioning, soccer … Read more

Number of words: 509 Slow-motion footage, X-ray images and computer simulations have shed light on how woodpeckers avoid injuries to their brains as they peck. Their heads move some 6m/s (20ft/s), at each peck enduring a deceleration more than 1,000 times that of gravity. But researchers reporting in Plos One say that unequal upper and lower beak … Read more

Number of words: 676 “The youth, the peasants, the working class, all with one voice must declare that we will not allow facism to raise its head in our country. We will not have dictatorships in our country, we will carry on our people’s government. This is not Bangladesh. This is not Pakistan. This is … Read more

Number of words: 333 Complex imported ideas, forced through the retort of Indian sensibility, often come out cleansed of content, and harmless; this seems so regularly to lead back, through religion and now science, to the past and nullity: to the spinning wheel, the bullock cart. Intermediate Technology should mean a leap ahead, a leap … Read more

Number of words: 499 In Naxalbari itself nothing shows and little is remembered. Life continues as before in the green, rich looking countryside. The town is the usual Indian country town, ramshackle and dusty, with its little shops and stalls, it’s overloaded buses, cycle rickshaws, carts. It is there, in the choked streets, after the … Read more

Number of words: 523 To be an inhabitant of a chawl is to be established. But in the nooks and crannies of this area there is – as always in India – yet another, lower human level, with people for whom there is no room have made home for themselves. They have founded squatter settlements, … Read more

Number of words: 373 Here is the piece of history. In the forties when the world recognised the genius of the little man who shook the mighty colonial empire and made the British to free India, the world’s top magazine Life thought it was imperative to publish a cover story on his great man. This … Read more

Number of words: 843 The question Niko set for me was a version of the question often labelled with the ‘nature or nurture?’ Cliche derived from The Tempest:A devil, a born devil, on whose nature Nurture can never stick…. Philosophers down the centuries have pondered the question. How much of what we know is natively … Read more