Some things to Reconsider

  Recently, Amit Shah, the honourable Home Minister, while addressing a book launch, declared: “In a few years people who speak in English will feel ashamed.” This wasn’t a slip of the tongue. Shah has long shown his fondness for “One Nation, One Language” and his distaste for English. Read between the lines and the message is clear: India’s rulers want to dictate not just how we vote, but how we speak, eat, pray, and now, even how we play. Indian politicians have one hobby that beats all others: sermonising. Instead of governing—writing policy, enforcing contracts, ensuring safety—they prefer to instruct citizens. Governance becomes homily, laws become sermons. Take two excellent columns in Business Standard . Devangshu Dutta dissects India’s new Online Gaming Bill, 2025, calling it another example of politicians confusing governance with sermonising. The bill, with one sanctimonious sweep, outlaws fantasy sports, rummy, poker—any game where money is wagered in hope of winnin...

https://theprint.in/national-interest/zohran-mamdani-new-york-mayor-indian-socialism/2673153/  https://www.business-standard.com/opinion/columns/zohran-mamdani-socialist-agenda-could-actually-spur-faster-growth-in-nyc-125062701427_1.html Shekhar Gupta’s recent column on Zohran Mamdani reads like a man trying to play neutral referee in a rigged match—raising one eyebrow at the Sanghi mob baying for blood, while slyly tossing them a whistle and pretending not to notice. With the other, it slips the ideological brass knuckles to the crowd already frothing at the mouth. Mamdani, Gupta suggests, is a well-meaning radical caught in a swirl of impractical dreams. But scratch past the polish of editorial polite prose and one finds the familiar discomfort of India’s populists and the extended coterie It’s not that Mamdani’s ideas are too radical—it’s that they are delivered from a platform that can’t be easily dismissed. A brown man, Muslim by heritage, representing a diverse district in ...