Just over seven years ago, on April Fool’s Day, 2001, I embarked on this column in The Hindu Magazine. But all good things must come to an end, and the time has come to bid my faithful readers farewell.

“I will share my thoughts with you on the world I see around me and some of the problems I come across,” I had said in that first piece, adding my intention to write about “the books I read and the people I meet, the issues I care about and sometimes, quite simply, ideas I find diverting”. Looking back on the more than 150 pieces I have inflicted on readers in this space, I hope readers will agree that I have kept my promise.

Subjective space

A column is a peculiar instrument: it sees the world in 800 words (reduced, in this case, from the thousand available before this newspaper’s re-design), limiting its perception of reality and nuance to what can fit in to the available space. At the same time, it is the vehicle for a specific point of view. The columnist rarely pretends to objectivity or strives for balance; the column is his vehicle, articulating his beliefs in his voice, and in that sense it is by far the most individualistic part of the newspaper.

At the same time, this column has enjoyed its own eclecticism. “A definite purpose, like blinders on a horse,” the American poet Robert Frost once wrote, “inevitably narrows its possessor’s point of view.” By that standard this column has been anything but narrow in its viewpoint. We have covered a host of topics with little to connect them: Hindu-Muslim relations and the nature of Indian identity; literature and literary figures; ancient Indian science and modern Indian politics; the information revolution and the age of terror. Amongst the individuals who strode across this space over the years have been Sai Baba and Sergio Vieira de Mello, George Orwell and George Bernard Shaw, Ramanujan and Rushdie; international luminaries as old as Albert Einstein and as fresh as Barack Obama; and personal favourites from Kofi Annan to P.G. Wodehouse and Irfan Pathan. We have ranged across the alphabet from Azad to Zaire, and fleshed out acronyms from NRIs to AIDS. We have argued with Tom Friedman over whether the world is flat, celebrated the paintings of M.F. Hussain, lamented the absence of humour in our national politics, and met Indian émigrés in New York, in Qatar, in Kenya and in Singapore.

And through it all we have obsessed about our own impossible country, India; about the forces that have made it and nearly unmade it, and about the future direction it must take. The idea of India, to use Tagore’s famous phrase, has always offered fertile ground to this columnist, and — judging by your reactions — to his readers. It is the idea of a land that is greater than the sum of its contradictions, a diverse society divided by caste, creed, culture, cuisine, conviction, costume and custom and still united around a democratic consensus. We carry with us the weight of the past, and because we do not have a finely-developed sense of historicism, it is a past that is still alive in our present. We wear the dust of history on our foreheads and the mud of the future on our feet. And yet ours is the land that the British historian E.P. Thompson called “the most important country for the future of the world”. All the convergent influences on the planet, he wrote, “run through this society: there is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East that is not active in some Indian mind”.

We have strived to articulate some of those thoughts, and in turn you, the readers of this column, have offered your own, doing your part to keep the conversation going, with arguments, information and insights all your own. It was truly a pleasure to hear from you, to receive your always-stimulating letters and emails. In my first column seven years ago, I expressed the hope that this column would become “an extended and amicable conversation” about “things that matter both to me and to the reflective readers of this newspaper”. That this hope was fulfilled remains, as I look back over the seven years I have occupied this space, my greatest satisfaction. The columnist truly writes for his readers, whereas the journalist writes for his editors. It is that distinction that makes all the difference.

Thank you

There is nothing like saying farewell to make you realise how much you liked what you are leaving. But there is never a perfect time, or way, to go. One that was hard to beat was that of one of the earliest columnists, the wittily acerbic Ambrose Bierce of the Hearst newspaper chain, who travelled to obse

Source: The Hindu