Your cover story Backroom Brahmins (Mar 30) has dared to put forth a brave and thought-provoking thesis, which no publication would touch upon, lest it be accused of "propagating Brahmin supremacy and caste politics in these modern times". Political correctness aside, I wish this thesis was extended/tested with other occupations also. I am no historian or social scientist, but I think such a study would bear out the fact that the much derided caste system was actually a functional division based on personality traits and types—horizontal rather than vertical.
Rahul Gaur, Gurgaon
In politics, success depends on the right strategy at the right time. This Chanakyaniti was true for the BJP as it was for NTR, who become an icon in Andhra politics by advocating Telugu self-respect. Now YSR has successfully completed a five-year term as CM with little opposition from the party, a rare event in state Congress politics. His Chanakya, K.V.P. Rama Chandra Rao, had a not insignificant role in this. Just like Timmarasu in the 16th century helped Krishnadevaraya ascend to the Vijayanagara throne.
Y.V.K. Ravi Kumar, Hyderabad
I used to be heavily anti-Brahmin like most non-Brahmins from Madras, but now I’ve grown wary of stereotypes. Of course I’m opposed to the caste hierarchy, but who’s not into it? Like the dark-skinned Tamilian who is anti-Brahmin but is upset over all those SC/ST "cheri pasangal! (young brats)" in the office. Everybody’s guilty of prejudices, American engineers hate those "cunning Indians", everyone is caught up in the anti-Chinese hysteria, all echoing anti-Brahminism. We can all be sly and manipulative but let’s do it without baiting a community.
Arul Francis, California
How come you missed out on the ‘Chanakya’ behind Barack Obama’s ascendancy and the Brahmin who makes the Earth revolve on its axis!
Pramod K. Kureel, Delhi
A mischievous article purposely intended to bring out the Brahmin-bashing dragons out of their lairs so that they can spout their venomous fire on the besieged community.
T. Sathyamurthi, Folsom, US
An apocryphal story and a string of logically weak assertions as the basis, a front cover that is an overly contrived depiction of a Brahmin, complete with namavali and sacred thread. All in all, it’s a weak portrayal of Brahmins as wily backroom manipulators.
Shyamal Mukherji, Mumbai
It’s high time we stopped this Brahmin-bashing and try to ‘level’ the playing field. I still remember an Outlook edition a few years back which had a cover story on Brahmin dominance in cricket, that as cricket was a non-contact sport, they were excelling in it!
Anoop H., Mysore
It’s just some political analysts, media figures and psephologists who keep harping on caste politics. Even the prima donna of caste politics, Mayawati, has abandoned casteism.
Manish Banerjee, Calcutta
VM seems to be working overtime to get the BJP vote divided. The cover photo just underlined the stereotype. For God’s sake, don’t reduce Chanakya, the man who gave us our first recorded guidelines on statecraft, to just a caste.
Kiran Bagachi, Mumbai
I agree Cho is close to Jaya, but he’s perhaps the only journalist in Tamil Nadu who has spoken against both Jaya and Karunanidhi (The Cho Must Go On). He’s by far the most balanced editor in TN, his shortcomings notwithstanding.
Keerthivasan, Chennai
Thuglak is a weekly, not a fortnightly as you mention.
Prasanth G. Narahari, Chennai
Facts are facts (Janeu, the Cat’s Cradle), and you have to grant the community one thing: its ability to adapt. Despite the persecution of decades, it has stayed at the helm of affairs. Why, all the legal and medical consultants of the celebrated Dravidian, Muthuvel Karunanidhi, are Brahmins.
Shyam, Chennai
From ancient times, Brahmins have played a double role in everyday life as well as in politics. They will do anything to survive. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them has coined the new-fangled bsp slogan—Haathi nahin Ganesh hai, Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh hai.
Ramesh Raghuvanshi, Pune
The author snidely attributes the success of Brahmins in politics to cunning! Will such stereotyping be acceptable to any other section of the populace?
Nandakumar, Chennai
With Pakistan’s economy in a mess and extremism on the rise, all political parties there must maintain cordial relations with each other if they want to avoid plunging into an abyss, providing the army one more chance to grab power (A Million Footfalls to Justice, Mar 30).
K.L. Venkatraman, by e-mail
We have seen democracy being restored and reburied time and again in Pakistan, if anything only a few metres deeper. This time it seems Swat will swallow it for good.
Niti Paul Mehta, Delhi
Anjolie Ela Menon in her piece, Sound of Boots on a Starry Sky (Mar 30), expresses concern for the safety of the exquisite Gandhara collection at the Lahore Museum. We should be doing the same for the part of the Lahore collection that came to India after Partition and is currently housed at Chandigarh Museum. Apart from the Gandhara pieces, it also has a rich haul of miniatures, most of which remain in dingy stores, unexhibited. The local administration is playing Talibanic havoc with this museum. The place has been without a professional director for the past couple of years and is run (amuck) by a bureaucrat. Overruling the expert advisory body, the museum has reportedly authorised the local administrator to select, as per his individual whims, art works for the museum collection. The museum has had no curator for decades. Why, one of its visual art advisors is visually impaired!
Balvinder Singh, Chandigarh
Your article Stranded Mid-Aviv (Mar 23) would make a good human rights case for migrant workers, regardless of the host country, be it Israel or Saudi Arabia. The fact is that illegal, or for that matter even legal, migrants in Gulf countries and Malaysia are exploited and humiliated, in some cases even tortured or killed, while the governments look away. Malaysia treats its own non-Muslim citizens of Indian origin with contempt and wilfully demolishes their places of worship with official sanction.
Vijay Agarwal, Northampton, UK
Your article, while true, paints a grim and cruel picture of Israel. Workers of these unorganised sectors are meted out similar treatment all over the world, including India. Of course, the flying visa scandal is something else but even there Indian agencies are involved. Anyway, what is our embassy there doing in this regard?
S. Raghunatha Prabhu, Alappuzha
Reading your article There’s a Spy in My Soup (Mar 30), one knows why the Pakistan isi is two steps ahead of its Indian counterpart! And if the Indian media can crack how rotten raw’s core is, one can very well imagine how much isi and cia know about it. No wonder we have to rely on the latter for any impending terror strike, and still not act upon it!
Kaye Sharma, Gurgaon
The harm done due to breach of protocol by officers you have mentioned is nothing compared to the harm caused by those who defect. Unfortunately, the defections don’t appear in the public domain, and rightly so. Never mind if names have been changed. If you can write about such instances, it shows how porous the Indian spy system is.
Sohan Aggarwal, on e-mail
Apropos Vote for Yourself (Mar 23), I didn’t expect that a two-penny bureaucrat in Hyderabad would be able to use Outlook. It’s outrageous to hint that the chief electoral officer is even slightly interested in voter enrolment. The move to have drop boxes in banks, post offices is just a publicity stunt, there are many banks where such boxes are still lying unopened. The widely publicised online submission of Form 6 for new voter registration is, to put it mildly, a fraud to ensure that voters do not get registered by submitting their forms at the mandal revenue office. There is no response to online applications nor any provision to track them. I know for a fact that there has been no verification of voters at least in Habsiguda, Hyderabad, so far. Even applications collected by political parties elicit no response from the election machinery. The voter enrolment statistics represent those voters who tried and tried and tried to get enrolled earlier. In fact, the joke in Hyderabad is that it requires a minimum of four attempts and routes to get oneself successfully enrolled! Yet, newspapers from Hyderabad pay daily tributes to the intentions of the AP ceo, and relegate the complaints of the electorate in some obscure corner.
V.K. Panjiyara, Mumbai
The typical Malayali business of peddling Judaeo-Christian mythology in the name of erudition has taken a heavy toll on education in the country, especially English medium (Censer Smoke, Mar 30). Churches of various denominations with their ill-concealed agenda of spreading an alien scripture have already created a pseudo-elite bloc of pedantic Indians—confident in their exclusivity and mercenary in their outlook. If the cpi(m) has now at last taken the bull by the horn, for whatever self-interest, they deserve the full support and encouragement of all right-thinking individuals.
Dr N. Moitra, Lumding
Apropos The Rankled File (Mar 30), Arun Jaitley resents the role of Sudhanshu Mittal in the BJP and trumpets his respect of ‘principles’, but he had no compunction in assisting and recruiting crooks and mafia dons as mlas for the party in Karnataka. Only money drives these people; governance is secondary.
R. Ramakrishna, on e-mail
Ratan Tata has made us feel proud (Reduce Your Turning Radius, Mar 30). The Nano is a giant-sized achievement. He had the guts to face his troubles in his own country and not move out like the ipl.
Dinesh Kumar, Chandigarh
If the ultimate goal is a car for every person, then the Nano could well be the answer. But has anyone thought about the mess that will follow? So much so that we probably won’t be able to breathe some years from now?
Nirmalan Dhas, Colombo
Welcome, dear countrymen, to bigger traffic jams.
Surya Sharma, Calcutta
So far Tata’s departure from West Bengal has been ascribed to causes ranging from political rivalry to the Bengali tradition of whining and protesting (A Small Carnage). But there’s also the conspiracy angle. For instance, the biggest loser due to Tata’s Nano will be Bajaj and its two-wheelers. These businessmen pay politicians for every small thing. Why not hire them (say, someone like Mamata) to stop this project? Then there is the Marxists’ love for China. In spite of being crowned the factory floor of the world, the Chinese are unable to move beyond their version of r&d (Research & Duplicate). The Nano would have busted their ego as well as their opportunity. So despite Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s exertions, the cpi(m) coudln’t have been too happy about this car.
Rajesh Chandra, Phoenix, US
Your coverage of the Nano made me feel good as an Indian but sad as a Bengali. Once West Bengal had the most industrial units in India, and Calcutta, they said, was next to London in financial and cultural glory. The Ambassador, erstwhile queen of the Indian roads, came out from the legendary Hindustan Motors of Rishra, situated in the Hooghly industrial belt. But as Naxalites and Communists with their anti-bourgeois mentality drove industry away, Calcutta became an industrial desert. Nano’s coming revived some hope, one thought it would correct the state’s investor-averse image and help Singur become the Detroit of India. Dunlop Tyres had resumed operation near Singur in 2006. Xenitis started making motorcycles in the same district (Hooghly). With the Nano and ancillary industries, the Hooghly district and West Bengal seemed set for a turnaround. With Buddhadeb, even the anti-industry CPI(M) seemed on board. Alas, it wasn’t to be. One Mamatadi, blinded by political ambition, changed history’s course yet again. Sometimes I really feel Bengalis, like the Irish, have an abiding sense of tragedy.
B.P. Chatterji, Mumbai
West Bengal is still living in a time-warp—it is yet to move beyond icons like Rabindranath Tagore, Netaji and Satyajit Ray. Calcutta is at best an advanced village. Whatever little economic mobility exists there is due to the immigrants; locals find strikes and adda a better way of life. Bengal is also probably the only region in the world where people are proud of being poor.
Sudarshan Bengani, Calcutta
West Bengal is a gone case. Outlook should stop wasting writing space on it.
G.S. Raj, Chicago
With all this talk of Nano these days, I can’t help but reminisce about those good days when OL was accompanied by a Nano (and not the car). My favourites were the ones by Ramachandra Guha and Amitav Ghosh. I hope they return sometime.
J. Chakraborty, on e-mail
With the Maoist regime set to destroy all the traces of Hinduism in Nepal and the dmk hell-bent on proving that Ram never existed, honouring the Dalai Lama, as K.C. Singh wants us to do in his column Shishya Dakshina (Mar 30), is too much for the Indian pseudo-sick-ulars to ask of us.
Anshul Gupta, Bangalore
I think it’s Bishen Singh Bedi who’s a first-rate hypocrite (Bindra’s Bogus Patriotism, Mar 23). He called Ganguly India’s worst captain, because he didn’t play his chela Sunil Joshi. Earlier, he had said Sunil Gavaskar was having a bad effect on Indian cricket.
Anurag Narayan, Delhi
It is a circumstance of an un-Outlook-ish sort when Vinod Mehta appears on the books pages (Mar 30). Is it an editorial duty, or was it a commissioned review? Was Mr Mehta honest in declaring Vir Sanghvi & Namita Bhandare’s biography of Madhavrao Scindia a ‘fine’ one? Is he convinced that the authors are proper biographers? Maybe Mr Mehta got carried away by the 14 rusty appellations of a sere royalty!
S. Sengupta, Ghaziabad
Few people actually lamented Madhavrao’s untimely death. The so-called maharaja did precious little for his own domain in Madhya Pradesh—Gwalior, Shivpuri, Guna etc. He was rude, arrogant and followed the textbook haughtiness of the much-caricatured native prince, especially when abroad. And he was laughed at by the people too.
Vijay Singh, Madrid
A good, ‘emotional’ piece. Reminded us of the elite gentleman of Indian politics.
Samir Sandilya, Guwahati
Mr Mehta recalled some of the greats who died young but, unsurprisingly, forgot the real icon—Swami Vivekananda. Do people really care about Rajiv Gandhi or Madhavrao Scindia? Would you even call them iconic? Can their ideals, if any, hold the attention of the youth?
Srinivas, Lucknow
It beats me how Madhavrao Scindia can be called visionary and competent. What did he do that was unique? Just because he died tragically and relatively young doesn’t mean he ought to be put up on a pedestal.
Ganesan, New Jersey
In Mumbai, where people calculate time not by their watches but by the route they will take and the traffic obstructions they’ll meet on the way; sidelining the Mumbai metro project would be a real setback to the people, who had heaved a sigh of relief when it was inaugurated, that too after being postponed a couple of times (Tough Graffiti, Mar 30). Of course, other projects are important, but when work has already begun in a direction, why give it a backseat? Further delay would also be a nightmare for commuters who drive up and down the Andheri-Ghatkopar road. Hope our officials and planners wake up to the woes of the people they actually work for.
Twishi Grover, Mumbai
Why would Pandit Nehru be turning in his grave (Mar 30)? It was his prime ministerial ambitions that led to the Partition of India. He’d be proud of great-grandson Varun.
Shipra, on e-mail
Nayantara Sahgal doesn’t want to harp on Varun Gandhi’s lineage. Why not? Would Varun—or his mother with her confused animal rights campaigns—have any political role but for their surname? Can they win even a municipal election on their own merit?
Biswapriya Purkayastha, Shillong
Nehru must have turned in his grave several times over—the Emergency, the ’84 anti-Sikh riots, the Meerut and Bhagalpur riots, the Assam and Kashmir violence....
Rahul Jain, on e-mail
While I disagree with what Varun said in Pilibhit, I’m not inclined to agree with Nayantara Sahgal either. Hindu-bashing in the name of secularism is the pastime of so-called liberals like her. The Nehru-Gandhi line, beginning with Jawaharlal, only appeased the Muslims. Ms Sahgal should stop being obsessive about secularism as she defines it.
Rajinder Kachroo, on e-mail
The best retort for Varun’s speech would be for leaders of minority religions to say exactly what Varun said—that they too will cut off the hands and tongues of people who raise their voice against Hindus!
S.S.V. Ramana Rao, Visakhapatnam
No doubt, Varun shouldn’t have made those speeches. But the way he’s being singled out by a media partial to the Congress is amazing. So many parties give tickets to out-and-out criminals. Leaders like Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar have got away with murder for want of witnesses. Sanjay Dutt faced serious terror-related charges but walks free. It seems Varun’s words are more offending than what these people did.
Anand and Swati Sriram, on e-mail
What is Nehru’s legacy? Socialism, which pauperised India; secularism, which was dumped by the Congress long ago to pamper minorities; and moral uprightness, which Indira et al abandoned long ago. So what is Nayantara Sahgal talking about when she says Varun’s lineage is irrelevant? He’s a chip of an old block of rotting wood.
C.K. Jaidev, UAE
We Indians love to hate others. Hindus hate Muslims and vice versa. The BJP hates the Congress and vice versa. The Sri Rama Sene hates women and their liberties. Parents hate their own children when they marry outside the caste or community. It’s this hatred inherent in us that people like Varun Gandhi feed on.
Shivkumar, on e-mail
Nayantara Sahgal can’t wish Varun away. He’s the son of Indira’s favourite son. If Varun’s making Nehru turn in his grave, I’m sure Indira made him do that much more.
Dr A.R. Mookhi, Mumbai
Ms Sahgal deserves accolades for calling a spade a spade. Varun’s hateful and nihilistic noises have no place in our democracy. Sooner or later, he’ll learn this at the hustings.
Bichu Muttathara, on e-mail
Varun’s a baby in politics. Why do we forget Rajiv Gandhi’s justification of the 1984 Sikh killings? The Congress cares only about one minority.
P.B. Joshipura, Virginia, US
This heart-felt article was worth reading. The BJP has once again admitted—through standing by Varun—that it cannot fight elections without stirring up hatred. After Narendra Modi, Varun has become their poster-boy. No wonder Balasaheb Thackeray said in Saamna that "this boy suits us".
K.N.S. Chadha, Moh ali
India needs a different model of secularism from Nehru’s, one in which the government doesn’t show bias towards a chosen few religious groups.
Giri Girishankar, New Jersey
I don’t approve of what Varun said in Pilibhit. But I also find Ms Sahgal’s article disappointing because she reinforces the widespread wisdom that only the Nehru-Gandhi family has all the world’s virtues. How can we forget the divisive politics carried out by that family?
Ravindranath Ramakrishnan, on e-mail
Why didn’t Ms Sahgal, who criticises Varun, keep in touch with him when he was growing up? Varun did exactly what Indira did during the Bangladesh war.
Nandasena Maduwanwela, on e-mail
The Congress spread fear and hatred towards Sikhs in 1984; Narendra Modi did the same in 2002 against Muslims in Gujarat. Both went on to win elections. Let’s hope Varun is punished at the hustings.
Kanwar Pal Singh, Spokesperson, Dal Khalsa, Amritsar
Varun Gandhi only acted in the way many of our politicians do. Hope he won’t get away scot-free. But I also wonder why he went and tarnished his own political career right at the beginning? Was there a hidden agenda? Only time will tell.
K.R. Srinivasan, Secunderabad
The problem is that the Congress is with Gandhis, not Gandhians. Ms Sahgal hasn’t made that obvious distinction.
Jayaraman, on e-mail
"The Congress, whatever its sins, is dedicated to secularism and the unity of India," says Ms Sahgal. Ask the Sikhs of Delhi.
Maha, on e-mail
Ms Sahgal says the BJP has divided the country on religious grounds by the BJP. She needs to be reminded that there was no BJP when the country was truly divided—into India and Pakistan.
S.B. Khadanpur, Bangalore
