Assembly elections in the aftermath of 26/11 have sent a dignified message. Every action has acquired an unimaginable almost ridiculous trajectory. A friend laughs and sits back in her chair and the question arises, will we meet again like this on a sunlit afternoon? A child runs towards its mother, the trajectory flashes out again: was there a child that was shot before it reached its mother, was there time for a quick word of farewell? We brush the trajectories away. Foolish flights of imagination, why think about them when the sun is out again and we are still alive? But the trajectories creep up on us repeatedly, reminding us that our lives are hemmed in by an invisible destiny. In the aftermath of 26/11 we have all subconsciously confronted those unimaginable trajectories that now exist in all our lives. Yet in a curious irony, while we were enduring the worst moments in India's collective existence, we were also blessed with a glimpse...

Hindu rage is the newest threat to civil society. Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur is a woman representing "Hinduism". Yet she is accused of killing innocents in bomb blasts at Malegaon in September. On tape, she utters the chilling words, "Why did more people not die?". The alleged mastermind of the Malegaon blasts is a serving army officer Lt. Colonel Shrikant Purohit. The Bhonsla Military Academy in Nashik, it is claimed, trained as many as 54 men in military and bomb making technology in 2001.The Malegaon blast investigation is yielding astounding results: there have been 9 arrests so far from Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. The network is extensive, well funded, welded by sheer hatred. Hindu samitis and sanghs are proliferating. Their membership is made up mostly of young men. These young men feel constantly insulted, constantly outraged by plays, articles and minorities. Their method of protest is always violence. A group called the Hindu Janjagran Samiti exploded bombs outside...

It is October in India. October of the silken sun and blossoming trees. October is a holy time. Durga comes sweeping down from the mountains. Iftaar dinners are in full swing. The lamps of Navratri are about to be lit. October is the time of renewal. And this October it is more necessary than ever to ask questions that will renew us all. There have been 16 major bomb blasts since 2002, and approximately 700 have died so far.The deaths have been meaningless and tragic but by the standards of most Indian calamities, approximately 700 deaths in 6 years is not a very high figure, not a figure suggesting that we are "a nation at war". So are we, policemen, media, government and politicians creating an industry and culture of "terrorism" and then feeding off it for our own purposes? Are these bomb blasts, acts of "terrorism" in all the epochal evil and ideological potency that the word "terrorism" today implies? Or are they...

A decade ago Jairam Ramesh wrote an insightful essay entitled "Yankee Go Home But Take Me With You". It was an analysis of the elaborate hypocrisy of the Indian political establishment, which preached a loud anti-Americanism publicly and privately yearned for all things Starred and Striped. Today, the Indo-US nuclear deal has signalled an end to the hypocrisy. The preachy sanctimoniousness about American imperialism is restricted to the Left. MPs now take crash courses in leadership at Yale University under the India-Yale parliamentary leadership programme. Many of the government's key economic advisors are bureaucrats and academics who have had long tenures either at the World Bank and IMF or at Ivy League universities. When Bush came visiting in 2006, Manmohan Singh said that as far as America and India are concerned there are "no limits on partnership." Attitudes to America have transformed as rapidly as Indian society has transformed. In the 60s and 70s, the Nehruvian elite studied at Oxford and Cambridge, scorned upward...