Ajay Pathak

The battle over the past is ultimately a battle over how a civilisation understands itself. AI generated image It is a celebrated maxim that history repeats itself—first as tragedy, second as farce. Yet, the deeper one peers into the abyss of antiquity, the further one can project into the horizons of posterity. Lessons extracted from the annals of time have perpetually served as guiding beacons for political statecraft, both ancient and contemporary. Historically, India was defined by...

At forty-six, Nitin Nabin—the chief of the Bharatiya Janata Party—has taken his initial, decisive steps to assert organisational authority. Stepping out from the long shadows cast by the seasoned political heavyweights of the Centre, the Modi-Shah duo, is a formidable endeavour. Yet, in orchestrating his inaugural slate of office bearers, Nabin has demonstrated subtle tactical adroitness, signalling a deliberate shift. Bringing back feisty Smriti Irani, who had fallen from grace, and giving...

The Hindi film industry’s old formula of sanitising Pakistan and demonising Indian society is now facing a box-office challenge from films putting national security and historical memory at the centre of the story. There have always been two distinct, divergent streams in the so-called Hindi film industry or Bollywood, often derided as a lame replica of Hollywood or derogatorily referred to as ‘Urduwood.’ One stream that promoted an agenda-driven, ‘left-liberal’ hypothesis was historically on...