I have been a frequent air traveler since I was a few months shy of my sixth birthday, when my parents packed me off to boarding school two plane rides away from home. Those days of being willingly handed from air hostess to air hostess as an "unaccompanied minor" made...

In the bloodstained aftermath of the horror in Mumbai, India picks itself up and counts the cost in lives lost, in property destroyed and, most of all, in the scarred psyche of a ravaged nation. But there are other consequences, yet to be measured, that the world will soon be...

As the country copes with the aftermath of the horrors of Mumbai, the hard work of reconstruction, of rebuilding -- of reimagining our country -- has begun. One genuine cause of satisfaction must be that there was no demonization of our Muslim minority, which the terrorists must have hoped to...

There is a savage irony to the fact that the horror in Mumbai began with terrorists docking near the Gateway of India. The magnificent arch, built in 1911 to welcome the King-Emperor George V, has ever since stood as a symbol of the openness of the city. Crowds flock around...

There is a savage irony to the fact that the unfolding horror in Mumbai began with terrorists docking near the Gateway of India. The magnificent arch, built in 1911 to welcome the King-Emperor, has ever since stood as a symbol of the openness of the city. Crowds flock around it,...

Movies made by westerners about India have rarely been worth writing home about, ranging as they've done from the appallingly ignorant racism of Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to David Lean's well-intentioned but cringe-making Passage to India, with Alec Guinness in brown face and dhoti, warbling...

Though the euphoria surrounding Barack Obama's election last week as President-elect has not yet begun to subside, it is already time to recognise that the most important challenge facing the next US president is to restore America's standing in the eyes of the world. A new president must reinvent the...

Sometimes mere words are not enough to capture the feelings associated with a particular moment. The election of a black American president on Tuesday has defied the skills of the most gifted wordsmiths. Historic, epochal, the dawn of a new era -- each syllable has tripped over its own inadequacy...

Note from the contributor: Shashi Tharoor's latest column in the Times of India (November 2, 2008) explains the US elections to Indian readers and he judges it too elementary to be suitable for cross-posting this week on the Huffington Post. Readers who are curious may find it by clicking...

For a few weeks now, I have tried to keep my promise to regularly cite and respond to readers' reactions, but I have to admit that the quantity and flow of mail has been a bit overwhelming, and the pressure of events has all-too-often diverted me to other topics. This...

The recent convulsions in the international financial markets have provoked an unseemly amount of gloating on the part of many in the developing world. That presidents Fidel Castro and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should pronounce themselves vindicated by the crisis in global capitalism is hardly surprising, since capitalism has over the years...

Last week, in responding to some of the hundreds of reactions I received to my September 28 column on the anti-Christian violence in Orissa and Karnataka, I tackled the vexed question of conversions to Christianity, which many readers argued constituted a provocation for the violence. But the conversion issue is...

My last column has triggered an overwhelming response. Gratifyingly, many readers (including several describing themselves as believing Hindus) are as outraged as I was at the anti-Christian thuggery that has been perpetrated in the name of Hinduism. Killers of children are not Hindus, even if they claim to be acting...

There are basically two kinds of politics in our country: the politics of division and the politics of unity. The former is by far the more popular, as politicians seek to slice and dice the electorate into ever-smaller configurations of caste, language and religion, the better to appeal to such...