When I was in my teens I was fond of hunting, and even came 5th in the Trap Shooting event in the U.P. State Shooting Championships. In winter we often sailed down the Ganga hunting wild geese sunning themselves on the sandbars midstream. Drifting downstream was easy, but to go against the current was a…

RAMBO NAMO has done it again, and succeeded in grabbing the headlines. At a rally at Ferguson College, Pune, on 14th July, he accused the Congress of hiding behind a burqa. I have no problem with Narendra Modi attacking the Congress party, its policies or performance. However, he stoops too low to attack persons. His…

(Portents for the Future) From the time of his election about 4 months ago, I have been an unabashed fan of Pope Francis. He has just published his first encyclical “Lumen Fidei” (The Light of Faith) on 29th June, the feast of Sts Peter & Paul. Through the good offices of a friend I was…

The print media is called the Fourth Estate. During World War II spies were known as the Fifth Columnists. What of the electronic media (EM)? Should we call them the Sixth State of modern society? I would certainly not call them the sixth sense, for reasons that I shall elaborate. Actually, I don’t see much…

(A reflection on the Catholic Directory of India 1912, in the light of the latest Catholic Directory of India 2013) During my school days I hated history, perhaps because it was taught so badly. Today, history fascinates me, be it of the country, the origin of the universe, or the church in India. This article…

(The concluding part of the trilogy on the Catholic Directory of India) It is presumed that facts and figures speak for themselves. That largely depends on how they are presented and the methodology used. In recent times our country has been rocked by the “presumptive losses” incurred in the allocation of natural resources like coal,…