Sainik School Tilaiya: an insider's tale

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It's my favourite story from the Sainik School Tilaiya days. It was around 2 am on a cold December night in 1989. The asbestos roof on our dormitory building added to the chill. I was awakened from my sleep by a loud call from behind the white bed-sheet curtains that our seniors hanged to mark their spaces as well as assert their seniority, "Re satvaan class, koi hai re?" 'Satvaan class' was the code for Class VII students, the Sainik School Tilaiya equivalent of bonded labour for their seniors. Class VI students, the junior-most kids in the Tilaiyan hierarchy, were put in a separate dormitory to undergo a year of initiation to the Sainik School way of life. As everyone in Class VII had by then understood, such loud calls were supposed to be ignored during that part of the night. After all, a collective thrashing in the morning....

An open letter to Americans on a decade of 9/11

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Dear friends and comrades, As I write this, television screens all over the world are already flashing their 'exclusive' coverage of the Big Sunday that will mark a decade of the tragic 9/11 attacks. The chilling images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center in New York - and the aftermath - will be played in a loop throughout the day. Families who lost their loved ones in the attack will come together to share their grief and anger; terror alerts would be sounded across the cities and the airports; analysts will be busy in television studios making a sense of the world since; and resolutions to fight terrorism and make the world a peaceful place will be renewed by leaders across the globe. Today, the world will join you in mourning the tragedy that not only changed your nation forever, but also - in many ways -....

In Forbes' India, Forbesganj remains an anomaly

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Bihar, in a new, resurgent India, is often presented as a case study of what a positive politics of development and inclusive growth can yield. While there are no actual figures to indicate the great turnaround that the state is credited with, the mere fact that a man can register one of the most charismatic election victories in recent times by merely building roads says a lot about Bihar's condition today. In fact, the aura around Nitish and his brand of 'no-nonsense' politics was so alluring that even the Gandhian crusader Anna Hazare succumbed to it when he said that Bihar and Gujarat are the two models that the UPA government at the centre should follow. Although Anna later retracted the statement after his 'civil society' friends objected to him endorsing the man in Gujarat who once presided over the killing of more than 2000 Muslims, in hindsight it....

Can a 'closed' AMU be a model for Muslims?

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If there is one obscure Latin word that the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) campus is quite familiar with, it's 'sine die'. I think it all started when former bureaucrat Mahmoodur Rahman, after assisting Governor Jagmohan in Kashmir where combing for militants meant forcibly vacating villages, started following the same logic at the Aligarh campus. During the five-year tenure of Rahman (1995-2000), the university was closed at least thrice. Since then, in my almost 18 years of association with the university, I have witnessed at least seven closures of the campus sine die. The incumbent Vice-Chancellor, P K Abdul Azis, has already closed the university thrice in his tumultuous tenure. The regularity of its recourse at AMU has made the administration completely oblivious to the harm it does to the students. The unfortunate regularity of sine die closures has made them a rule at the AMU campus. There is....