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In the last forty years Bangalore has exploded from a sleepy ‘air-conditioned garden city’ into one of the most chaotic megalopolises of India, its economy dominated by business corporates like Infosys, Wipro and Biocon, and a host of others which have come up in their shadow. There was a time when it was a city whose hotels filled up only during the horse racing season and emptied immediately thereafter, whose finances were controlled by two distillaries, and whose intellectual reputation was sustained by half a dozen research establishments protected from the hurly-burly of the outside world by hefty government funding and sprawling green lawns.

It is now twenty-five years since Peter Hopkirk’s book was published, the great game between Imperial Russia and Great Britain in Central Asia that he celebrated is forgotten, as dated as marbles in an age of video games, but it remains worth reading, not just because it is beautifully written, but because it still raises questions, sets off trains of thought, and goads the reader to explore the issues he writes about. Few books do this, and those that do age well.

The title of this short essay invokes the title of a landmark volume, published in 1985, Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol. It expresses the theme that unites a clutch of books, all of which were published in the mid-1980s and had an enduring impact on scholarship in a field of Indian politics. In different ways, these accounts of the political economy of development and redistribution underscored the centrality of the state.

Usually, when the editors of this jour nal ask me to write something, I decline. But this time I had to accept because they asked me to write something about the most influential writer in economics in the 20th century. It was—as the Americans say—a no-brainer because there is only man who fits the bill: John Maynard Keynes, who stands out by a mile. To me, he was as much an economist as a very deft political thinker.

Homosexuality, lived out freely and fearlessly, places before the individual and society a real set of imperatives, challenges and opportunities: to put reason and humanity before fear, habit and prejudice; to test our unexamined assumptions regarding some of the basic elements of human life—the family, marriage, parenthood, independence, loneliness, companionship, fidelity, promiscuity .

When Gerda Lerner’s Creation of Patriarchy appeared, nearly 30 years ago, in a pre-globalized era, middle class, mainly upper caste feminists teaching in colleges in Delhi (and elsewhere) read it avidly, begging, borrowing (but hopefully not doing more than that), and discussing it in the small, intense study circles that dotted the cityscape.