All posts in Javed Naqvi

IF all journalism were objective there would be no need for Al Jazeera to become a raging foil to BBC, CNN or Fox News for the coverage of

WHEN the 9.0 intensity earthquake rocked my room at Tokyo’s double-storey International House on Friday, I passed it for one of the routine tremors the Japanese hosts had

RIGHT-WING movements concoct enemies to consolidate their hold on the masses. Hitler used the Reichstag fire, for example, by portraying the mysterious incident as a communist and Jewish

DURING the early rule of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, someone in his government placed two evidently unusable anti-aircraft guns of Second World War vintage on a visually

LOBBYISTS for nuclear arms everywhere, more so in India and Pakistan, would like us to have unalloyed faith in their infallibility. Whatever the nature of their nuclear doctrine,

LOVERS of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a large number of them in India, are celebrating his birth centenary with fervour this week. To the cognoscenti Faiz represented revolutionary zeal clothed

WITH unremitting euphoria gushing forth from Tunisia and Egypt I went looking for Henry Mencken’s exact words that might describe my reluctance to flow with the tide. “A cynic

MORE often than not, subjective opinions, obscurantist beliefs and deep-rooted prejudices influence judges across the world. Had everyone on the bench thought like Justice Ghulam Safdar Shah in

Jared Lee Loughner killed six Americans and left Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords fighting for her life in Tucson. His motives are variously given as drug-related lunacy and links with

CONSIDERING the dire straits that India and Pakistan are in today with their respective versions of religious insanity, who can deny the urgent need to sink mutual differences

THEY are the world’s most powerful and largest democracies, respectively, but the United States and India have something most undemocratic in common. They both outsource means to kill, torture

Paida hua vakeel to shaitaan ne kaha: Lo aaj hum bhi sahib-i- aulaad ho gae! (The day the lawyer was born in our midst Satan became a father, and clenched his

RAMA nee samaanamevaru ` in Telugu translates as: `Ram, who is your equal?` The words herald a most loved composition by the South Indian maestro Thyagaraja which

That Sukhi Lala owns much of India`s mainstream media is not news. In a predominantly agrarian country the usurious Lala – as depicted in the classic movie Mother

RABINDRANATH Tagore wrote a poem in praise of the British monarch. It was adopted as the national anthem of free India, and the irony of it persists. He wrote

The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) was never meant to be a body of intellectuals debating ideals of Indian nationalism. It was groomed as a fascist organisation, and as

WHEN US President Barack Obama chose to stay at Mumbai`s Taj Hotel last week, it was seen as a gesture of America`s solidarity with India`s fight against terrorism. The

ON the face of it, the Adarsh housing society scam in Mumbai does not look very different from dozens of similar scandals spawned by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s

The creation of Pakistan from the Indian subcontinent was not inevitable. It happened despite several attempts to avert its formation, including efforts by the Muslim League. Former Indian

Kyun na jannat ko bhi dozakh mein mila lein ya rab Sair ke waastey thodi si jagah aur sahi. MIRZA Ghalib had pondered the merger of heaven and hell

DELHI’S Outlook magazine has published a special edition to mark its 15th anniversary. Articles by a range of media specialists provide plenty of food for thought. A telephone

The Ayodhya dispute is hardly a Hindu-Muslim issue and it would be more realistic to see it as a contrived stand-off fanned by a pseudo-secular state to keep

An Aesopian story I heard in 1990 from a Hindu priest of Ayodhya may hold a lesson for India’s dizzying romance with religious revivalism, which is inexorably mutating

President Obama is likely to go to the Golden Temple in Amritsar next month. Different reasons are being given for the first visit by an American president to