Ever since January when the damning report of the US-based Hindenberg Research — a self-confessed short-seller firm in stock markets around the world — was published, prices of the equity shares of Adani Group companies listed in the National and Bombay Stock exchanges, have plummeted and continue to search new lows. The Hindenberg Report alleged […]
One of the biggest disappointments of the purportedly pro-business and private sector BJP which is set to complete its second term in office, is its failure to privatise India’s 28 public sector banks, foolishly nationalised by then prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1969. Since then over the past half century, nationalised banks managed by risk-averse […]
Staged in grand style on October 13-14 in New Delhi’s J.W. Marriott Hotel, the EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) 2023-24 Awards Nite — proclaimed as the greatest education felicitation and celebrations show on earth — has come and gone. The two-day event attracted over 2,000 leaders (and their uninvited guests who blew the budget) […]
Some people never learn. Instead of being repentant that the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty which led post-independence India down the socialist road that bankrupted the country destroying the modest material aspirations of one — perhaps two — generations, Rahul Gandhi, the latest scion of the dynasty, seems determined to use the wrecking ball to destroy Gautam Adani, […]
The appointment of Rishi Sunak as prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and his durability in office for over a year, is a reality way beyond the imagination of the most inventive writers of the fantasy television serial, Bridgerton. This popular sitcom set in the 19th century which was a big hit in […]
One can’t help feeling sorry for the trustees of Ashoka University (AU), Sonipat (Haryana) India’s first crowd-funded university established at vast expense (estimated at Rs.2,000 crore) with successful members of the Indian diaspora mainly in the US chipping in Rs.5-25 crore each.
Ashoka U generated great excitement within the country’s expanding middle class when it was […]
The loud forecasts of prime minister Modi that India is all set to become a major 21st century superpower are likely to prove illusionary unless the country beefs up — sorry, politically incorrect — improves its manufacturing sector. Currently, manufacturing contributes a mere 15 percent of annual GDP with services contributing over 55 percent and […]
With assembly elections looming in several states including Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Telangana, the minute one switches on the idiot box these days or flees to a magazine, one is assaulted with blaring state government ads and splashes of Prime Minister Modi inaugurating mega projects in Uttar Pradesh or another BJP ruled state. And […]
Evidently the top leadership of the BJP/NDA government at the Centre doesn’t comprise students of history. If it did the BJP would cease and desist from brazen attempts to ram Hindi — the lingua franca of the most economically backward and lawless states of India — down the reluctant throats of hundreds of millions of […]
Financially, Indian cricket — and cricketers — have never had it so good. In the past quinquennium, BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India) has earned a revenue of Rs.27,400 crore, transforming into one of the richest sports governance bodies worldwide, rivalling NBA, USA and the English and European Football leagues. Last year, it […]
That the left hand of the gargantuan 18 million strong neta-babu brotherhood that micro-manages the country through thousands of superfluous laws, rules and regulations, doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, is hardly a national secret. A case in point is schizophrenia about foreign investment in the Indian economy required to increase the number […]
Although they are an unmitigated blessing which have reduced long-winded train journeys to a sepia memory, there’s something wrong about the hyper-commercialism of the men (in the words of a learned judge, the word embraces women) who run India’s airlines. The pejorative “price gouging” doesn’t seem to be part of their vocabularies. Recently when the […]
Among the most dedicated, but also under-appreciated professionals are Indian hospital nurses. Perhaps for reasons connected with the country’s obnoxious caste system, these silent professionals are not accorded the social respect that they are given in enlightened countries globally. They are also pathetically under-paid. Some five years ago, when I was felled by one of […]
The imminent collapse of the Bangalore-based edtech start-up Think & Learn Pvt. Ltd aka Byju’s, makes one wonder about India’s talking-heads stock market and financial experts who drove up the sky-high valuation of this online tutoring company which rose to $22 billion (Rs.1.8 lakh crore) at its peak in 2020. Common sense and logic should […]
Although Prime Minister Modi gave a good account of himself in his recent state visit to the US and perhaps even charmed President Biden and the general populace, Modi bhakts should resist the temptation to interpret this bonhomie as blanket endorsement of BJP rule over India during the past decade. That the word ‘democracy’ was […]
The reason why India’s landmark economic liberalisation and deregulation initiative of 1991 has not delivered double digit rates of annual economic growth it should have during two decades past, is because closet commies and bolshies within the Academy are not yet convinced that capitalism aka free markets, is the best prescription for rapid economic growth. […]
News that HDFC Bank and HDFC (Housing Development Corporation) Holdings have merged to form HDFC Bank, the fourth largest lender in the world by market cap, is a great leap forward for an economy whose housing stock is arguably the worst worldwide. Over 80 percent of the country’s 260 million households live in dilapidated homes […]
According to top brass of the State Bank of India, May 15 was a red letter day for the bank and the country. Full front-page ads splashed in the Times of India and several other dailies informed the long-suffering public of the silver jubilee (25th anniversary) of SBI credit cards. For your editor, it was […]
The death in London on May 17 of Srichand Parmanand Hinduja at age 87 received grudging paragraphs and cursory coverage in the Indian print and television media, given to saturation coverage when politicians and movie stars with relatively modest achievements go the way of all flesh.
The seeds of the global Hinduja family were laid by […]
The Adani case gets curious and curiouser. Now that the Supreme Court has absolved SEBI (Securities & Exchange Board of India) of any lapses in investigating whether there was any truth in the Hindenburg Report of January which accused infrastructure — airports, marine ports, cement, grain silos and edible oils, media — developer Gautam Adani […]
Aspiring prime minister Rahul Gandhi often asks why business tycoon Gautam Adani is so “close” to prime minister Narendra Modi. A better question would be: can any industrialist or businessman afford not to be on the right side of any politician, especially the prime minister.
The plain truth is Rahul’s great grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru, a professed […]
A merry game of musical chairs is being played in the country’s top-ranked schools. In wake of the belated liberalisation of Indian education, including the K-12 sector, global multinational school chains entering the moribund education sector and greenfield schools springing up everyday, principals/headmasters and well-qualified, competent subject teachers have become hot property. Therefore, the scramble […]
Hardly two months have elapsed since the Hindenburg Report of a shady outfit of confessed short-sellers with no fixed address and five ‘researchers’ on their payroll, wiped out a staggering Rs.9 lakh crore of the market value of Ahmedabad-based coal, ports, green energy, grain silos and airports tycoon Gautam Adani on the Indian stock market. […]
That India is ranked #80 out of 150 countries on the Berlin-based Transparency International’s Corruption Index 2022, well below Botswana, Chile, Taiwan and Cabo Verde, doesn’t seem to bother India’s politicians and middle class — “we are like that only” — who love to proclaim India’s greatness from every available roof-top. Yet for man’s sheer […]
All of India has gone gaga over two Indian productions — knockout song Naatu Naatu from the blockbuster hit RRR and documentary short film The Elephant Whisperers — winning top honours at the 95th Oscar Academy Awards held recently in Los Angeles. However, it’s pertinent to note that but for OTT (over-the-top) major Netflix co-producing […]
There’s something seriously wrong with the heads of the top brass in Central government agencies such as the CBI, Enforcement Directorate and Income Tax Department, who summon and question citizens for eight-ten hours at a stretch to unearth alleged suspected crimes and misdemeanours.
Take the case of K. Kavitha, MP and daughter of Telangana chief minister […]
Even if they read the tragic story of Rajendra Tukaram Chavan, a Nashik (Maharashtra)-based farmer who travelled 70 km to the Solapur APMC (Agriculture Produce Marketing Centre) to sell 512 kg of painstakingly grown onions, readers of this top-selling daily — (ToI, 24/2) — overwhelmingly indifferent, urban middle class citizens — are unlikely to lose […]
There’s a deep and deepening sickness within middle class India. It is prompting this 300 million-strong and growing class to speed like demented lemmings towards self-destruction. Whenever an individual of Indian origin makes it big abroad — as in the latest case of Ajay Banga, former CEO of Mastercard, selected by US President Joe Biden […]
It’s well established that British rule over India began with the victory of Robert Clive, manager of a trading outpost (‘factory’) of the East India Company in the Battle of Plassey (1757). At Plassey 3,000 Brit and Indian troops hired to provide security to the factory, defeated the 50,000-strong army of Siraj-ud-Daula, Nawab of Bengal. […]
Some television news anchors and bristling retired army brass seem to be itching for a border skirmish, if not war, with troops of China’s People’s Liberation Army massed along India’s 3,488 km unsettled border with China stretching across almost uninhabited terrain from Kashmir in the north-west, to Arunachal Pradesh in the north-east. But the national […]
Any citizen of India with a conscience cannot help but weep for the unfortunate condition of the industrious, uncomplaining and continuously short-changed people of the eastern state of Bihar (pop.104 million). Despite a mountain of evidence that liquor prohibition has failed in every country and society since it was promulgated in the US in the […]
Less than a decade ago, one read and heard proclamations of India’s tourism potential with a big dose of scepticism, if not derision. The plain truth was that beyond the front gates of 5-star hostelries, India was too chaotic and filthy, and if tourists ventured further into the hinterland, bad roads, unhygienic restaurants and dirty […]
CHRISTMAS EVE VIDEO INTERVIEW between articulate and incisive interviewer Karan Thapar and celebrated NDTV journalist Ravish Kumar has elicited much appreciation within the chattering classes, particularly leftists and liberal fellow travellers. Kumar’s claim to fame is that as an anchor of NDTV’s Hindi channel, he had established an excellent reputation for fearlessly speaking truth to […]
THE ADVENT OF OTT (OVER-THE-TOP) choice-based cinema and television series from around the world has given a new lease of life to India’s floundering film industry, Bollywood in particular. With well-scripted and intelligent movies produced by cinema and entertainment corporations such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar among others accessible to a new generation of Indian […]
A MULTIPLYING TRIBE OF KILLJOYS IS ruining the social life of India’s teenagers and young adults whose number is estimated at 300 million countrywide.
This lament is provoked by a news report in Bengaluru’s Times of India (December 15) that a search of the handbag of a young woman student of a junior college in the […]
FIFTY YEARS AGO, INDIA’S FREE PRESS WAS indeed the fourth estate of the Republic. Powerful editors such as Frank Moraes, Sham Lal, Girilal Jain, Khushwant Singh and C.R. Irani strode the national stage. However in 1975, when prime minister Indira Gandhi declared India’s first — and thus far only — State of Emergency and imposed […]
UBIQUITOUS POTHOLES; MONSOON FLOODING; traffic jams and gridlocks; power and water shortages; runaway omnibuses; no parking space; itchy-palmed traffic policemen and municipal corporation employees. To that list add noxious air quality and millions of viruses looking for warm bodies. The weight of evidence is overwhelming: 21st century India’s chaotic, ill-governed cities are in meltdown.
THERE’S NO SHORTAGE OF MARXIST AND socialist intellectuals within Indian academia ready, willing and able to argue that European powers of 18-19th centuries plundered and pillaged third world countries so thoroughly — the Indian subcontinent in particular — that we haven’t been able to recover our pre-colonial glory and momentum. These faux intellectuals conveniently forget […]
LIKE THE BOURBON KINGS OF 16TH CENTURY France, members of the opposition Congress party refuse to learn from history. Despite this vintage political party (estb.1885) being roundly trounced in two successive General Elections (2014 & 2019), Congress has rejected the party presidency bid of erudite and charismatic Dr. Shashi Tharoor, former assistant secretary-general of the […]
ALMOST A DECADE AGO, ONE ANIL SHARMA, a general manager of this publication, resigned and started a rival magazine under the name and style of Education Today. Initially published as a print magazine in which school principals and leaders wrote their own encomiums, it currently bills itself as an education portal. However, its main business […]
When Times Higher Education launched the Arab University Rankings three years ago, universities in the prosperous Gulf states were the leading lights. But this year, .....Read More
Paromita Sengupta Currently celebrating its 21st anniversary, this K-12 school is ranked among the Top 10 co-ed day schools in Gurugram in the EducationWorld India .....Read More
