The Daily Fix: Netaji conspiracies prove the Bengali mind is obsessed with the past and eight other great weekend reads

The Latest: Top stories of the day

1. Netaji files: Jawaharlal Nehru gave family no concrete evidence of Bose’s death.
2. Indirect tax reforms major priority for Centre, says Arun Jaitley.
3. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta appointed editor of Economic and Political Weekly.
4. Tamil Nadu: Three medical students commit suicide, blame administration and high fees.
5. At least 14 dead as blizzard paralyses US East Coast.

Weekend reads

1. Bose papers declassification: the Bengali mind is more obsessed with the trivialities of the past than with the travails of the present, argues an edit in the Telegraph.
2. Apurva in the Indian Express charts the story of Rohith Vemula, a how a boy who loved science, impressed with his English and worried only about the environment grew into the angry young man demanding answers on identity and caste.
3. Gautam Bhatia in the Mint writes about India’s sedition law and how it continues to survive.
4. Dalit activism made it to Hyderabad campuses starting the ‘70s. Still, students and teachers say, they are "marked out from the day they enter campus. Sreenivas Janyala reports in the Indian Express.
5. Japan repeatedly prodded India to take back the purported ashes of Subhas Chandra Bose but successive governments in Delhi refused to, files declassified today have revealed, writes Charu Sudan Kasturi in the Telegraph.
6. In the Business Standard, an excerpt from Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s speech about a friendlier tax regime at the function to inaugurate Start Up India.
7. Matt Labash writing in the Weekly Standard tells us nine tales of Donald Trump at his trumpiest.
8. In the New York Times, Allan Ahrenhalt tells the tale of how Charles and David Koch, the enormously rich proprietors of an oil company, have deeply influenced conservative politics in the United States with their campaign donations.
9. Using techniques from evolutionary biology, scientists have traced folk stories back to the Bronze Age (and also identified the Indo-European homeland to the Russian Steppe), Ed Yong writes in the Atlantic.