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This is where to come for my take on life and times in the world’s largest democracy
13 hours ago
Has India's most populous state of Uttar Pradesh seen an unprecedented democratic upsurge?
Election officials believe so. They say that a record 62% turnout in the first phase of the seven-phase vote on Wednesday is the highest since 1947, up from a dismal average of 46% in the 2007 polls. "It rains votes in Uttar Pradesh," said a clever headline in The Hindu newspaper.
11:08 UK time, Tuesday, 7 February 2012
Economist and former US Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith called India a "functional anarchy" some 30 years ago.
Now Ramachandra Guha, renowned historian and author of India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, says instability is India's destiny.
12:19 UK time, Wednesday, 1 February 2012
For close to two weeks, the distressing story of a two-year-old toddler has grabbed India's attention.
A teenage girl brought the battered toddler to a hospital in Delhi and left her there. Doctors found she had serious injuries - human bite marks all over her body, broken arms and a partially smashed head. They said they had not seen abuse of this level on such a small child. Nearly a fortnight after she was brought to the hospital, the toddler is on life support in the intensive care unit.
08:07 UK time, Monday, 30 January 2012
All good things have to come to an end - but the end in Adelaide over the weekend was brutal.
India were routed in an overseas cricket Test for the eighth time in a row - four by an innings and two by more than 290 runs. The team's fabled batting line-up, stuffed with ageing legends, lay in ruins, mowed down by a bunch of terrific young Australian speedsters. The Adelaide annihilation came on a flat track holding no terrors.
14:03 UK time, Tuesday, 24 January 2012
The Sir Salman Rushdie pull-out - first physical, and then virtual - from the Jaipur literature festival must come as a huge embarrassment for India, a nation that openly talks about its aspirations of becoming a superpower.
Once again, the so-called "mighty" Indian state has succumbed to threats of violence from fringe, trouble-making religious groups. Once again, it has been proved that it only requires the threat of violence to hold India to ransom.
10:44 UK time, Friday, 20 January 2012
Two years ago, Salman Rushdie said he was worried about a rising "culture of complaint" in India.
Speaking at a media conclave in Delhi, he referred to the case of the late artist MF Husain. Bigots had vandalised the painter's works, threatened him and literally drove him out of India. He lived in exile in Qatar and died in London last year.
15:27 UK time, Tuesday, 17 January 2012
The uncertainty over Salman Rushdie's participation in the Jaipur Literature Festival following protests by an Islamic seminary has a sense of déjà vu about it.
To be sure, the 64-year-old author hasn't officially called off his trip at the time of writing. The organisers say that he's not turning up on the first day of the five-day festival, but have removed his name from the list of speakers. Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot has made it abundantly clear he would prefer Mr Rushdie to stay away.
16:46 UK time, Thursday, 12 January 2012
Has the explosion of media in India been a mixed blessing?
With more than 70,000 newspapers and over 500 satellite channels in several languages, Indians are seemingly spoilt for choice and diversity.
02:45 UK time, Tuesday, 3 January 2012
Some people may drone on endlessly about how Test cricket is losing its appeal, but I will continue to wake up before dawn in the morning in my non-heated apartment in the freezing Delhi winter to watch India play Australia. When a few more lights from the looming towers that ring my apartment block pierce through the fog, I know I'm in the good company of people who think alike. India have never won a Test series in Australia - and have already been whipped in the first game at Melbourne. But I want to be watching if and when we win one. A fan lives in eternal hope.
I pledge to wage a war on cliches at home, work and the world. The "body language" of cricketers and leaders at international summits, for example. Or how every upcoming talent is a "genius". Or how every street protest is a "revolution" or "Tahrir Square" in the making. Or the frenetic world of the non-breaking "breaking news" that I live in. Or how everything - writer, book, sportsman, film - is a "brand". Where I live, an upstart concrete-choked suburb called Gurgaon, real estate companies call themselves "colonisers" and the media faithfully call them the same. Now that's an honest cliche.
08:03 UK time, Friday, 30 December 2011
Are India's politicians serious about cleaning up public life?
After Thursday night's debacle in the upper house of the parliament, many believe they aren't.
11:10 UK time, Wednesday, 28 December 2011
Has Anna Hazare's popular anti-corruption campaign run its course?
When the folksy, septuagenarian former army driver began a new hunger strike at a ground in Mumbai on Tuesday demanding a strong anti-corruption law, only a few hundred people turned up. He had moved the venue of the fast to India's financial capital because of the cold snap in Delhi.
04:33 UK time, Monday, 26 December 2011
The battle for Uttar Pradesh has begun, and in the words of one commentator, the "ground is shaking in faraway Delhi".
Uttar Pradesh is one of India's key bellwether states with a population of 200 million, similar to that of Brazil. In February, over 100 million of its people will be eligible to vote for its 403 assembly seats in a staggered seven-phase state election.
16:36 UK time, Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Will the proposed law to provide cheap food to more than half of India's people eliminate hunger, the most shameful scourge of an aspiring superpower?
The jury is still out on how the $19bn (£12bn) scheme will work, as is the case with similar big-ticket welfare schemes launched by what many believe is an endemically weak and corrupt state.
11:03 UK time, Friday, 16 December 2011
When Rahul Dravid talks, people listen.
The star batsman has always been a thinking, introspective sportsman. With a staggering 24,000 runs in Tests and one-day games under his belt, 38-year-old Dravid is also eminently qualified to talk about the future of cricket.
14:21 UK time, Wednesday, 14 December 2011
Is India's showpiece multi-billion-dollar unique identification number (UID) programme unravelling?
Using biometric methods, including an iris scan, the scheme is logging details of India's population on a central database. Over five years, India plans to issue 600 million UID numbers.
11:25 UK time, Friday, 2 December 2011
The economy is crawling and inflation is nudging close to double digits. Food prices are going up. Key legislation which could help crack down on corruption needs to be tackled. The demand for a new state of Telangana hangs fire.
Yet the parliament of the world's largest democracy remains in limbo.
02:16 UK time, Tuesday, 22 November 2011
It's that time of the year again for India's febrile media - the time to resurrect Rahul Gandhi, scion of the Gandhi dynasty and India's prime minister-in-waiting.
It's time to tell the world again that the 41-year-old heir apparent is finally gearing up to lead his party, and in the event of a victory in the general elections in 2014, the government too. The reason to resurrect Mr Gandhi is also familiar: Mr Gandhi kicked off Congress's election campaign in Uttar Pradesh last week.
00:13 UK time, Wednesday, 16 November 2011
For a country obsessed with people's life stories, Indians don't write absorbing autobiographies or biographies.
Most of them turn out to be long-winded hagiographies or self-absorbed and pedagogic narratives. India remains a deeply hierarchical society where criticism is often taken as a personal affront.
00:28 UK time, Friday, 11 November 2011
The world's most famous boy reporter with a trademark quiff set foot in India only twice.
In Tintin in Tibet, one of Herge's most elegantly drawn albums, the intrepid Belgian scribe arrives at Delhi airport en route to Kathmandu and a new adventure.
13:19 UK time, Wednesday, 9 November 2011
Soutik added analysis to:
Wednesday's verdicts are significant because they relate to one of nine key incidents in the Gujarat riots that are being probed by an independent Special Investigating Team (SIT).
The SIT was set up in 2008 following a Supreme Court directive.
Before joining the BBC, Soutik worked with Indian newspapers and magazines and an international newspaper as a correspondent and an editor.
He was a Reuters Fellow at the University of Oxford.
Soutik has covered elections in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, the tsunami in India and Sri Lanka in 2005, and militancy in Kashmir, working mostly on a series of stories on the state of youth and women in the disputed region.
In 2005, he used a laptop link to connect BBC News readers from around the world to a people living in a Pashtun village in Afghanistan. He revisited the village two years later to do a similar project and to see how life had changed.
He loves blues and jazz, and believes Derek Trucks is the best and most innovative slide guitarist alive.
He is a big movie buff, with Michael Haneke, Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, Woody Allen and Satyajit Ray among his favourite directors.
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