Unite and rule
Divide and rule was the dreaded curse. Historically, the British Empire was blamed for playing the divide and rule strategy to fester, create and sustain conflict in territories they enslaved…
Divide and misrule
THERE was a time within living memory when Britain was an unrivalled global power. Its colonial empire stretched pretty much across the world, and for decades at a stretch its…
Rules of the game
Socities are built on institutions, which are, as economist Douglass C. North put it, the “rules of the game” that help propel us towards, or restrain us from, the path…
Ground rules for true referendum
A former Indian diplomat, the rare service where you can still find a few liberal souls, once served in Indonesia. What the diplomat told me left me aghast. It seems…
Media resistance in British India
In my previous article, ‘Discursive paradigm of resistance’ (August 8) published in these pages I discussed two major approaches of resistance: the coercive approach and the discursive approach. The coercive…
Resistance literature and the British Raj
Literature is traditionally considered a means of pleasure and enjoyment that focuses on beauty and spreads happiness in an artistic manner. This thesis is the guiding principle for the school…
To educate our rulers
Again and again, we are reminded of the mess we have made of our education. The statistics, compiled by a number of global outfits, remain unrelievedly depressing. And a recent…
National College and the British Raj
The story of educational resistance to the Raj is not complete without the mention of the National College, which was set up in Lahore by Lala Lajpat Rai in 1921.…
For some British firms, red tape spreads from London, not Brussels
Troy Barratt, a small business owner in this south-eastern English town, has a list of labour, energy and safety regulations that add to the costs of his precision metal fabrication…
Our ‘offshore’ rulers
We are endlessly lost in what could pass for a puppetry drama where actors made of flesh and actors made of wood are together producing a constant comedy of errors.…
