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This is where to come for my take on life and times in the world’s largest democracy
12:51 UK time, Friday, 25 May 2012
The Indian Premier League's (IPL) ongoing fifth season has turned out to be the most closely fought one so far. But, off the field, it has also been the most controversial.
A bunch of young IPL cricketers were suspended after they were stung by a news channel talking about alleged under-the-table transactions and spot fixing taking place in the league.
09:58 UK time, Wednesday, 23 May 2012
"I will be the first person to say we need to do better," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Tuesday, while releasing his troubled government's report card on three years in office during its second consecutive stint. "But let no one doubt that we have achieved much."
Mr Singh rolled out an impressive list of achievements.
11:02 UK time, Friday, 11 May 2012
India has more than 10,500 drug makers with a domestic turnover of nearly $9bn.
Yet, something is rotten with the way drugs are tested and sold in the country.
14:00 UK time, Friday, 4 May 2012
India's aviation industry is in deep trouble.
On Thursday, Aviation Minister Ajit Singh told the parliament that the airlines are expected to report a combined loss of nearly $2bn for the last financial year. Independent analysts peg last fiscal's losses at $2.5bn.
18:44 UK time, Wednesday, 2 May 2012
This morning, a piece in Business Standard, one of India's most respected newspapers, caught my eye.
Examining data on the economic performance of Indian states during a seven-year-period (2004-11), AK Bhattacharya, editor of the newspaper, wrote that he was puzzled by the data on Gujarat.
07:44 UK time, Monday, 30 April 2012
Sachin Tendulkar is India's most-loved icon, and is worshipped by millions for his amazing cricketing feats. His fans think he's a god who can do no wrong on field and off it.
Yet, the world's most feted cricketer is also somewhat of an enigma - he is an inscrutable man, and has publicly stated that he is not entirely comfortable with manic fan worship.
03:55 UK time, Wednesday, 25 April 2012
Why are leaders of opposition-ruled states making life difficult for India's federal government?
In West Bengal, the feisty Mamata Banerjee has refused to give her consent to Delhi's water sharing treaty with Bangladesh, put her foot down on allowing foreign direct investment in supermarkets, and has complained that Delhi is not helping her state, which is drowning in debt.
09:30 UK time, Friday, 13 April 2012
Are cricket fans turning their backs on the ongoing fifth edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL), the world's showcase fast cricket contest?
If TV ratings figures are to be believed, fans have had enough of cricket despite the nine-team, 76-match, seven-week Twenty20 tourney.
11:36 UK time, Thursday, 5 April 2012
Hope is not a policy, but neither is despair, as South Asia expert Stephen Cohen says in a recent essay on Pakistan.
So it is with relations between India and Pakistan.
01:27 UK time, Thursday, 29 March 2012
Is India losing its mojo because of bad politics?
It's an obvious question to ask at a time when powerful - and populist - regional parties are again flexing their muscles at a fickle federal government, key economic reforms are seemingly stuck in the bog of messy coalition politics, and the government is struggling under an avalanche of corruption charges. Economic growth and investment have cooled and inflation remains high.
01:21 UK time, Tuesday, 27 March 2012
Thirty-eight-year-old Noorjehan Abdul Hamid Dewan is an unlikely rebel.
She grew up in a large family surrounded by the hum of prayers and "religious men with long beards". She got married at the age of 17 to a man who recorded the number of dead at a local hospital before he lost the job, and ended up on the streets driving an auto rickshaw for a living.
05:26 UK time, Friday, 23 March 2012
Who are the poor in India?
The fact is nobody quite knows. There are various estimates on the exact number of poor in India, and the counts have been mired in controversy.
14:01 UK time, Friday, 16 March 2012
Soutik added analysis to:
Pranab Mukherjee said the finance minister's job in India is not an easy one.
It is even harder when your government is battered by corruption charges, under pressure from irate allies, has suffered a drubbing in recent state polls and is perceived to be indecisive and slow.
11:08 UK time, Friday, 16 March 2012
The "ridiculous thing", as an English cricket writer described Sachin Tendulkar's quest for his 100th international century, took a long time coming - in fact the longest since the time taken between his first hundred in 1990, and his second, 511 days later.
It also appeared to wear him - and his fans - out. The wait, as Mike Atherton said, had not "only become tiresome, as it shone a harsh light on Sachin himself and what is motivating him to continue". In the run up to his newest record, Tendulkar's batting reminded Atherton of a "novice learning the ropes rather than someone who has learnt them better than virtually everyone in history".
07:02 UK time, Friday, 16 March 2012
Is anybody really surprised that nearly half of India's 1.2 billion people have no toilet at home?
Not really. The India Human Development report has been saying this for a while. The situation is worse in the villages, where two-thirds of the homes don't have toilets. Open defecation is rife, and remains a major impediment in achieving millennium development goals which include reducing by half the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015.
11:10 UK time, Tuesday, 13 March 2012
India will not become a superpower, says Ramachandra Guha, renowned historian and author of India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy.
Taking the lead in a special report by the London School of Economics, Mr Guha outlines seven reasons to support his thesis.
10:06 UK time, Friday, 9 March 2012
The late Peter Roebuck, one of the world's greatest cricket writers, once exclaimed that removing Rahul Dravid from the crease would possibly need gelignite, an explosive material invented by Alfred Nobel.
Roebuck was observing Dravid withstand a fearsome Australian pace attack with his trademark fortitude, attrition and immense powers of concentration.
11:23 UK time, Tuesday, 6 March 2012
Are India's state election results a blow to Rahul Gandhi's bid to become a truly national leader and bolster the flagging fortunes of his Congress party?
On the face of it, it does seem so.
03:36 UK time, Thursday, 1 March 2012
"It was a blot on the state. It was deplorable," says Jay Narayan Vyas, a senior minister in the government of Gujarat, which exactly 10 years ago saw some of the worst religious rioting in India since Independence.
"But Gujarat has moved on. Nobody is concerned [about the riots any more] except the media and NGOs. Today, it's a bad dream."
01:15 UK time, Monday, 27 February 2012
How does it feel, I ask World Press Photo award winning photographer Arko Datta, to meet the subject of his best-known picture for the first time?
Ten years ago, Arko's picture of a tailor named Qutubuddin Ansari became the face of religious riots which left nearly 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, dead in Gujarat.
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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