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Chandrahas Choudhury
For Chandrahas Choudhury's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
COMMENTARY / World
May 28, 2015
Narendra Modi is too old for modern-day India
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist agenda is out of synch with the values of India's youth.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 13, 2015
India's growing crisis of democracy
An ambitious political experiment engineered by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist party in the border state of Jammu and Kashmir — the only Muslim-majority state in India — threatens to implode within just a few days of its start.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 9, 2015
Indian voters allow for an upstart
Perhaps a sense of the increasing lopsidedness of political power in India explains why so many voters around the country are so keenly interested in the results of last weekend's elections in the city-state of New Delhi, involving the fledgling Aam Aadmi Party.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 1, 2015
Obama and Modi work the magic of 'optics' for the benefit of each other's home crowd
For his first Republic Day in office — a day when India celebrates its republican history, diversity and military might with a grand pageant in New Delhi — Prime Minister Narendra Modi dipped into his hat and pulled out Barack Obama. The main point of the U.S. president's visit seems to have been 'optics.'
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 12, 2015
The campaign to glorify Gandhi's assassin
A strident new campaign by a radical Hindu group seeks to rehabilitate the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 as an Indian hero who was inspired by 'love of country.'
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 29, 2014
An all-Hindu vision of India
India's powerful, male-only Hindu nationalist outfit announces an intensive conversion program to recover its 'lost property' in India, feeding its dream of an India that is nothing less than '100 per cent Hindu.'
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 16, 2014
What economics can learn from human beings
Legend has it that it's hard even to get bank staff to read the 'World Development Report' published annually by the World Bank. The report for 2015 should prove to be an exception, though, as it appears to help policymakers understand deeply ingrained habits or cultural settings.
COMMENTARY
Nov 27, 2014
In India, sadly, flying and fighting go together
Why do manners go out the window as soon as Indians board a plane?
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 24, 2014
Narendra Modi takes India's mojo to Australia
The process of Australia being drawn toward Asia is one in which a more ambitious India now looks set to play a much bigger part.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 22, 2014
India working its magic on Narendra Modi
The difference between the BJP and all other major Indian political parties today can be boiled down to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's energy, charisma and political capital.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 9, 2014
Old school is new again at India's Nalanda
Many years of work by Amartya Sen and an international team of academics has culminated in the reopening, after eight centuries, of Nalanda University — funded mainly by the governments of India, Japan and China — to its first batch of graduate students in two disciplines.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 4, 2014
History wars restarted to hook schoolchildren
South Asian well-wishers of Indian Prime Minister Nerendra Modi may not be amused to hear that books will be sent to the schoolchildren of Gujarat, describing an 'undivided India' that encompasses the nation-states of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 15, 2014
How World War I inspired independent India
It's been almost forgotten that more than 1 million subjects of undivided colonial India fought in World War I for the Allies — about 75,000 lost their lives — following a massive recruitment drive by their British masters. The new age of nationalism ushered in by the Great War inspired Indian independence.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 30, 2014
'Black money' fairy tale drives Indian adults
Millions of adult Indians enthusiastically propagate a fairy tale that says once a strong government brings billions of dollars of 'black money' home, India will cease being poor and take its rightful place among the superpowers of the world.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 13, 2014
Indian soccer's strange World Cup history
Might the history of Indian soccer have taken a different turn if India's football federation had decided to send the golden generation of the '40s to the World Cup in 1950?
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 7, 2014
Language of Indian politics
Even those Indians who are assumed will automatically vote their caste in the current election have choices and will make a number of fairly sophisticated mental trade-offs.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 23, 2014
In defense of traditional Indian masculinity
A male Indian novelist chips away at the simplistic picture of the gender wars in India, whose men, according to a OECD survey, spend just 19 minutes a day on 'routine housework.'

Longform

Historically, kabuki was considered the entertainment of the merchant and peasant classes, a far cry from how it is regarded today.
For Japan's oldest kabuki theater, the show must go on