Articles by Vidyadhar Date

The Cousins Thackeray: Uddhav, Raj and the Shadow of Their Senas by Dhaval Kulkarni, Penguin Random House,2019; pp 320, ₹ 399.

For centuries, humans have kept fit by doing simple exercises. But today, people are falling for the gym industry’s aggressive marketing.

Vigilantism has deep roots in the state’s political culture, going back a long way.

The Indian upper classes have been clamouring for a corporate-friendly political ethos. They want a set of chief executive officers in the political realm, those who will be accountable to them, not to the masses. In this, the US Ivy League has been busy facilitating, via high-profile training programmes, the emergence of such a class of leaders. The tragedy is that such a model of leadership has been discredited in the very land of its origins, but this does not deter the Indian elite.

In the haste to convert Mumbai into a world class city we have failed to study the experiences of western cities, which are suffering from the ill-effects of rampant privatisation and foreign partnership in public services, notably transport. Our cities need to focus more on providing basic amenities than in chasing dreams of becoming world class.