By Khushwant Singh

Some weeks ago I wrote in this very column a piece entitled ‘Bhajpa’s swabhiman’ saying that when Mohan Bhagwat, head of the RSS, asked Nitin Gadkari who had proved his worth as a minister in the government of Maharashtra to take over as president of the BJP, he specifically directed him to replace old leaders like LK Advani and the caucus based in Delhi by younger blood and infuse new life in the party.

By Barkha Dutt

As provocative, bumptious and aggressive as Shah Mehmood Qureshi can be — Pakistan's foreign minister was not quite the loose thread that pulled at the fabric of the Islamabad talks and left both countries embarrassingly exposed and without any fig leaves to hide modestly behind. A dead-end was always the destination for these talks if you look carefully at how the journey has been mapped and at the fact that like victims of an obsessive compulsive disorder, India and Pakistan seem destined to repeat the same fatal mistakes over and over again.

By Rajdeep Sardesai

When Karnataka’s infamous Reddy brothers make their Diwali gift list this year, they might consider sending a large present to Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Had she not chosen the traditional Congress bastion of Bellary as a safe constituency alternative to Amethi in 1999, the Reddy brothers may well have disappeared into the wilds of central Karnataka.

By Khushwant Singh

Not so very long ago, black people in America were called negroes, niggers, blackies, and treated as third-rate citizens only good enough to mix with other blacks. Those who accepted their lower status without protests were known as 'Uncle Toms', those who became uppity were lynched by gangs of the Klu Klux Klan. Slowly white Americans' outlook changed. Instead of using ugly, racist denominations, they began to call dark people Afro-Americans. Then all of a sudden there was a change in the mindset of the whites.

By Sagarika Ghose

Indian ‘dotheads’ with their multiple-armed, elephant-nosed gods have taken over the once pure white American town of Edison, New Jersey and destroyed the memories of innocent white boyhood. That’s the burden of Joel Stein’s controversial article in Time magazine that led to so much uproar among the Indian American community that Time and Stein were forced to apologise. But while Indian Americans have ressed their outrage at Stein’s ‘humour’ and asked why a mainstream publication like Time should publish such an article, there’s also an argument that Indians should learn to take themselves less seriously.

By Khushwant Singh

Of all the professions, healing the sick is regarded as the noblest. Jesus was a healer — Isa Masih. He could heal people by the mere touch of his hand. He did not charge any fees for doing so. Since then healing has become an expensive business as healers have to undergo six years of learning how to heal and have expensive gadgets like stethoscopes, thermometers, blood pressure gadgets, blood sugar counters, X-Ray machines and much else