Anuradha Rao

Cinema ceases to interpret reality when it begins to shape how that reality is understood. There is a reason history is easier to watch. Even when it is selective, dramatised, or quietly biased, history comes with distance.  It allows us to engage without feeling implicated. We can question it, critique it, even reject it - but we are not inside it. The present offers no such comfort. When cinema focuses on the present, it ceases to be a secure narrative space. It starts shaping how we...

The enduring weakness of India’s education policy lies not in reform design, but in the absence of an organised constituency that turns learning into leverage. A longtime reader once told me my writing on education was “good writing” but “idealistic.” I was irritated at the time. How can education, the one subject every parent worries about, be called idealistic? But two recent editions of India Today forced me to reconsider. A January commemorative issue arranged the country’s past across...

India’s war on coaching centres is being fought everywhere except where it matters most. In June 2025, the Ministry of Education constituted a high-level committee to examine students’ growing dependence on coaching centres and to recommend measures to reduce it. The MoE’s order is unusually candid in its diagnosis. It acknowledges that Indian schools are not building critical thinking or analytical depth, that rote learning continues to dominate classrooms, that formative assessment remains...