Gurcharan Das looks back to the Mahabharata in search of ethical guidance for India in a time of galloping growth, explosive conflict and dizzying change, Ananya Vajpeyi writes.

James Tooley, The Beautiful Tree: A personal journey into how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves, Penguin; 302 pages; Rs 499

I first met James Tooley on a cold morning in Delhi. I was drawn to him by his sincerity, his passion, and most of all by his infectious smile, which made everyone in the room smile back at him. As I watched him I thought of Tagore’s observation in the Stray Birds about how much the world loves a man when he smiles.

The pursuit of goodness

We in India have our own history of thought on the subject of goodness, but they’re lost within arcane texts

Mobius Strip | Ramesh Ramanathan

For most of us, our days are consumed by the immediate: project deadlines, the day’s agenda, children to pick up. What is often missing is an underlying foundation, a deeper rationale that guides our actions.

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The conviction this week of Ajeet Singh Katiyar in Delhi in the notorious Dhaula Kuan gang rape case of a university student from Mizoram is good news. More important than the conviction is the 71 page judgement of the court which admonished the defence for maligning the victim and maintained that the private life of the victim is irrelevant. ‘A lady who has lost her virginity is not unreliable’ said the judge, whose verdict was primarily based on the victim’s consistent testimony.

At a smart luncheon party in South Delhi this week something very peculiar happened. Someone blurted out, ‘These high and mighty guests are friends of Madhu Koda!’ This did not go well with our celebrity hostess, to whose discomfort the conversation soon went downhill as people sought the latest ‘juice’ on the Koda scandal. To my surprise, a consensus seemed to emerge that liberalization was at the root cause of corruption.

Upholding the law: the difficulty of being good

The media won’t always talk about them, for all this happens far away from the arc lights and there are many others who stand up to be counted, in the IAS and outside, every single day

Off The Record | Srivatsa Krishna

If only we would pause and look beyond the horizon of day to day events, we would see a trend of great significance. More people on the earth have risen out of poverty in the past 25 years than at any other time in human history, and this has happened primarily because of sustained high economic growth in India and China. Unlike China which has embraced growth enthusiastically, India has a vast industry of ‘poverty-wallas’, who incessantly raise doubts if our growth is pro-poor.