The intent behind the Conduct of Election (Amendment) Rules 2019 notified by the Election Commission of India on February 26 that all candidates for the Lok Sabha election beginning on April 11, are obliged to file their income tax returns of the past five years and provide details of foreign assets held by them, is […]
Alas, poor Chanda Kochhar, who reluctantly resigned her office as managing director of ICICI Bank last October.
Yet there is some merit in the assertion that all too often, success doesn’t sit lightly on women who rise to high positions. They fall precipitously from grace because they easily succumb to the sins of hubris and […]
With GDP growing at 7 percent-plus per year, the Indian economy is the fastest growing worldwide, China included. This claim is being made from every available roof top by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which is readying for General Election 2019. But while this claim is accepted by the IMF, World Bank and even The […]
The Pune-based Bajaj family which owns and manages the eponymous Bajaj Group of companies is riding high these days. In January, the Delhi-based Business Today certified it the country’s fourth biggest business group in terms of market capitalisation (Rs.3.77 lakh crore). Moreover on January 23, the House of Bajaj was voted the country’s #1 family […]
Fiery trade unionist, socialist and former Union minister George Fernandes who passed away on January 29 was given an indulgent, even laudatory send-off by the editorial writers in the media. The reality that he was one of the most self-serving and turncoat politicians in the history of post-independence India, was interred with his bones. Your […]
Some political pundits interpret it as a grandmaster’s move on the political chessboard of the country in the final run-up to General Election 2019. But in your editor’s ’umble opinion, the conferment by the BJP-led NDA government of the Bharat Ratna — independent India’s highest civilian award — upon former President Pranab Mukherjee has devalued […]
Sobering data for reflection on Republic Day (January 26 when this note is being written) is provided by the UK-based charity Oxfam International which released its Global Inequality Report 2019 on January 20, to coincide with the start of the five-day World Economic Forum 2019 convention in Davos, the annual meeting point of the world’s […]
Although your editor has been in the media business for over four decades, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to retain respect for the schizophrenic, illogical and partisan pundits and journos crowding the print, television and social media. On the one hand, many of them tend to be drum-beating hyper-nationalists proud of the illusory achievements of this […]
The AgustaWestland helicopters scandal in which kickbacks, estimated at Rs.3,700 crore, have allegedly been paid to several middlemen — including Air Marshal (Retd.) S.P. Tyagi, former chief of the Indian Air Force, and Dubai-based broker Christian Michel, now in CBI custody for customising the Union government’s tender specifications to suit the Anglo-Italian AgustaWestland — seems […]
During the past few months, several well-researched books on the Indian economy written by émigré academics based in blue chip American universities have received good reviews and exposure in the Indian media. The authors of these learned tomes — Kaushik Basu (The Republic of Beliefs: A New Appraoch to Law & Economics (2018)), Arvind Panagariya […]
The unexpected emergence of Rahul Gandhi, president of the Congress party which has ruled at the Centre and most states of the Indian Union for over half a century since independence, as a prime ministerial candidate in 2019, has given a new impetus to dynastic politics. After the December legislative assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya […]
A flood of memories relating to one of the greatest entrepreneurs of post-independence India rushed through your editor’s mind on November 26, which was half-heartedly celebrated as National Milk Day in memory of the late Dr. Verghese Kurien (1921-2012), promoter-chairman of the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd (GCMMF) and the National Dairy Development Board […]
Undoubtedly, considerable discomfiture is being experienced by former Hindi television news anchor Vinod Dua whose news and current affairs video show on The Wire platform has been suspended indefinitely following his “trivialisation” of sexual harassment charges pertaining to 1989 made against him by Nishitha Jain, a film producer.
Jain recently outed Dua for stalking and attempting […]
India’s democracy experiment and especially the ill-advised decision to introduce universal adult franchise without any education qualification, has enabled the worst elements of urban and rural elites — a lumpen bourgeoisie driven entirely by self-interest and aggrandisement — to rise to the highest offices of the nation.
The sudden downgrade of the rating of the Infrastructure Leasing & Finance Services Ltd from AA to junk bond status in early September which triggered a panic on the stock exchanges and has wiped out investors wealth valued at Rs.2 lakh crore, is a riddle in a mystery wrapped inside an enigma.
The detailed sexual harassment charges made against former star editor and media columnist M.J. Akbar, who was obliged to resign his office as Union minister of state for external affairs on October 17, have come as a great shock to your editor who worked conterminously with him in the Kolkata-based Ananda Bazar Patrika media group […]
There’s a peculiar armour-plate quality about India’s politicians whose lust for power is in inverse proportion to their capability to use it for the public good. No shame or scandal can disturb their determination to cling to seats of power, come hell or high water.
In the Congress party’s 1946 election for the post of president, […]
One would have thought that the prime purpose of a responsible newspaper, particularly a daily whose logo bears the injunction “Let truth prevail” is to report news as and when it occurs, without fear, favour or prejudice. But even within reputed vintage newspapers there’s no shortage of mean-spirited individuals in positions of high authority who, […]
It’s a comment on the times we live in that the pump price of petrol and diesel is over Rs.80 and Rs.75 per litre respectively, at a time when the international price of crude oil is hovering around $80 per barrel. In the bad old days of the Congress-led UPA-I government at the Centre (2004-09) […]
With the multiplication of channels on the idiot box, and every Tom, Dick, Jane and Jenny reading news bulletins from teleprompters describing herself as a journalist, our tribe is fast losing social respect.
Moreover, the fact that the country’s largest and most prosperous media house whose flagship English language multi-city newspaper editions are awash with full […]
Bombay House, the impressively solid five-floor sandstone building of Tata Sons Ltd and the Tata Group (aggregate annual revenue: Rs.710,000 crore) sited in Homi Mody Street in the downtown central business district of Mumbai, reopened for business on July 29, after it was shut down for renovation last winter. However, with a new regime calling […]
The death in London of celebrated writer and Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul on August 11 was not unexpected; he had been ailing for a long while. Although your editor who once knew him well, was estranged from him in the last decade of his life, one can’t help experiencing pain of loss because Naipaul’s acute […]
Although invariably well-ranked on the parameter of leadership in the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings, principals of even most admired schools tend to be deficient in their knowledge of business mantras such as brand building, funds-raising and institution development. This awareness dawned on your correspondent (also editor of India’s first two pioneer business magazines) when […]
A first time holiday excursion to Bali, one of the islands of the Republic of Indonesia (pop. 266 million) last month, transformed into a week of some pain and anguish. Indonesia is a third world country even more notorious for government corruption than India, ranked #96 in Transparency International’s 2018 league table — 15 places […]
The abrupt resignation and flight to America of Arvind Subramaniam, chief economic advisor to the Central government, so soon after he authored the widely acclaimed Economic Survey 2018-19 on the flimsy ground that he has become a grandfather, highlights one of the great infirmities of post-independence India’s society. It is saddled with an effete elite […]
Some of India’s top-ranked international schools have become the playgrounds of spoilt brats of the country’s noveaux riche, even if not famous. On February 20, social media was abuzz with reports that a class VII student of the Pathways School, Gurgaon sent an outrageous rape threat to his class teacher on Instagram, and added injury […]
One could blame the Jain brothers of the Times of India — perhaps the richest newspaper and media group worldwide — for the phenomenon of paid news which has become ubiquitous with the market leader ToI openly proclaiming that it is ready, willing and able to publish purchased news. This in your humble editors […]
Although celebrated as a best-selling writer-intellectual by half-educated youth of the country who according to our cock-eyed politicians are the nation’s demographic dividend, there’s a simpleton quality about popular novelist/columnist Chetan Bhagat. Recently in a television interview, he discerned anti-Hindu bias in the Supreme Court order (October 9) banning the sale of fire crackers in […]
The recent death on September 27 of Playboy publisher-editor Hugh Hefner in his Los Angeles Playboy Mansion, surrounded by his trade mark bunnies, brings to mind the comparatively modest effort of the unlikely Mumbai businessman Sushil Somani and several editors, including your correspondent, to establish Debonair as India’s answer to Playboy.
Less than five years ago, the Delhi-based Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM, estb.1973), fronted by its flamboyant pony-tailed promoter-director Arindam Chaudhuri, was one of the biggest advertisers in the mainstream press with a penchant for full-page ads in the Times of India which trumpeted IIPM as one of the Top 10 B-schools in […]
The recent demise in Delhi of Brij Mohan Lal Munjal, chairman of Hero MotorCorp Ltd — the country’s largest producer of automotive two wheelers (6.63 million units in the year ended March 31, 2015) — marks the end of an era of the two-wheeler manufacturing industry in India. It’s pertinent to note that right until […]
Post-independence India’s democratic experiment — its only major achievement of the past 68 years — is slowly unravelling.
Because of the reckless indiscipline and private agendas of the country’s politicians of all ideological hues, the parliamentary democracy system is dissolving before our very eyes. Both houses of Parliament are not being “allowed to function” by opposition […]
It’s official. Economics Nobel laureate Dr. Amartya Sen won’t serve as the chancellor of the ambitious new Nalanda University (NU) slowly taking shape in Rajgir, Bihar, after his first three-year term ends in June. In a letter written to the board of governors of the fledgling varsity, Sen says he believes the 11-month-old BJP-led government […]
The Supreme Court’s scathing November 20 order passed against Ranjit Sinha, director of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), while hearing an application filed by the Delhi-based Centre for Public Interest Litigation, directing Sinha to recuse himself and not “interfere in the 2G spectrum investigation and trial”, has confirmed the worst fears of the tax-paying […]
THE TAKEOVER OF MEDIA conglomerate Network 18 Media & Investments Ltd (NMIL) by Mukesh Ambani, executive chairman of the yarn-to-oil and retail giant Reliance Industries Ltd — India’s largest private sector company (annual revenue: Rs.401,302 crore) — for a reported consideration of Rs.2,692 crore in early July, has sent shivers down the spines of media […]
ALMOST ANYONE WHO is anyone in the fraternity of scribes has written an obituary of the legendary editor, author and loveable rogue Khushwant Singh who passed away on March 20 at the age of 99. Ergo it’s obligatory for your editor to also opine on the life and times of this iconoclast who shook up […]
The delight which all right-thinking citizens of this benighted republic groaning under the incremental weight of open, uninterrupted and continuous corruption practiced by the Congress-led UPA government for nine long years experienced when the neophyte Aam Aadmi Party trounced the Congress in the Delhi state election of December, is fast turning into disillusionment. With each […]
Although the vast majority of the nation’s citizenry which includes captains of industry eagerly awaiting President Pranab Mukherjee’s invitation to Narendra Modi to form the next government in New Delhi, has missed its implications, the sensational exposé of the Modi-led Gujarat government’s stalking of a Bangalore-based woman architect is a chilling preview of things to […]
Although it’s derisively referred to as the idiot box for the shallow, ephemeral infotainment it provides, the power of television news channels to expose ground realities in some of the country’s hidden areas of darkness cannot be matched by the print media.
A case in point is CNN-IBN’s excellent multi-episode documentary titled No Country for Children […]
The adjudication and enthronement of Indian (Andhra)-origin Nina Davuluri as Miss America 2013 is not only a triumph for this 23-year-old medical student, but also a well-deserved slap in the face of the brain-dead badshahs of Bollywood and beauty pageant organisers, who seem to be innocent of all notions of ethnic good looks. Although multi-ethnic […]
- Reshma Ravishanker In a second such incident in less than a month, students in Bengaluru were caught carrying e-cigarettes to school. This was confiscated .....Read More
Vidyashilp University recently hosted its premier event, India Rising: Aspiring Undergrads Summit 2024 at P. Dayananda Pai Auditorium in Yelahanka, Bengaluru. The event united leading .....Read More
