The puppy-under-motor car analogy drawn by Gujarat chief minister and BJP’s national election committee chief Narendra Modi whose prospects of becoming prime minister following the 2014 General Election are improving by the day, reveals a dangerous mindset. Responding to a question by a Reuters correspondent on whether he experienced remorse over the massacre of 2,000 […]
With Gujarat strongman Narendra Modi emerging as the BJP/NDA front runner for prime minister in the General Election due next summer, the remarkably long run of the incumbent septuagenarian Dr. Manmohan Singh of the Congress-led UPA government is all but over. But Singh has little cause to complain considering that contrary to the Lincolnian assertion, […]
In your editor’s not unlimited experience of seminars and intellectual fests, the three-day Milken Institute Global Conference 2013 spread over April 29-May 1 in Los Angeles, was arguably the greatest accumulation of the choice and master spirits of our age. The more than 3,000 attendees (most of whom paid $7,500 (Rs.4.13 lakh) delegates’ fee for […]
One of the peculiar anomalies of self-styled socialist India governed by a greedy establishment with superpower aspirations is that it is the largest importer of arms, ammunition and defence equipment worldwide. The fact that 46 percent of the country’s children suffer chronic malnutrition induced by poverty, mass illiteracy and unemployment for which the Central government’s […]
Arguably no denouement in recent times has given as much satisfaction to the country’s smug and risk-averse Indian middle class as the comeuppance of Subrata Roy, the self-styled managing worker of the reportedly one-million strong Sahara Pariwar (family) which is actually a clutch of para banking companies, with claimed 30 million depositors spread across the […]
A curious paradox of the Indian establishment is that a growing number of its children are choosing to desert this democracy and live abroad, especially in the US. This strange phenomenon came into sharp focus on February 5 when the New York-based Open Society Justice Initiative released an exhaustive 214-page report, exposing 54 countries that […]
The reportedly rising number of readers of this page are surely well aware that your editor is no Bollywood buff, and certainly not a fan of its over-hyped ham actors, whose movies are an assault on the senses and an insult to people with even minimal intelligence and logic.
However a surprise endorsement of my sustained […]
In the tower of Babel which is the public discourse the world’s most populous democracy dominated by politicians whose prime motivation — it’s easy to discern — is not the public good but primitive capital accumulation, Justice (Retd) Markandey Katju, chairman of the influential but toothless Press Council of India (estb. 1966), stands out as a […]
The death due to natural causes in Mumbai of Shiv Sena founder-supremo Bal Thackeray (86) brings closure to an inglorious chapter in the political history of India and Bombay — India’s commercial capital — which he perhaps more than any other individual, transformed into Mumbai, the crime capital of India.
Despite all encomiums and veneration including […]
According to the Delhi-based IT industry lobby Nasscom (National Association of Software and Services Companies), the garbage (NB: that’s not a typographical error) city of Bangalore (pop. 8 million) aka the Silicon Valley of India hosts more than 170 IT and related companies with an estimated 500,000 employees on their muster rolls. Official encouragement given […]
The flood of media eulogies for the late Dr. Verghese Kurien, former chairman of the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF, owner of brand Amul) and architect of Operation Flood (which transformed milk-deficient India into the world’s largest producer of milk and dairy products), is in sharp contrast with […]
Congress party veteran and former finance minister Pranab Mukherjee’s consummately plotted transition from North Block, New Delhi to the magnificent 340-roomed Rashtrapati Bhavan, marks the culmination of Mukherjee’s 40 years of survival and prosperity in the treacherous corridors of power in the national capital. On July 22, following his 69 percent vote of an electoral […]
On several occasions, the frequent — once every nine days — peregrinations abroad at public expense of Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission (exposed by India Today), have provoked trenchant comment on this page.
Now it transpires that the itch for free foreign travel is not peculiar to Ahluwalia. Information reluctantly provided under […]
The puritan ethic of thrift and saving is a virtue to be admired. But in business and industry, if the invisible line between thrift and plain old-fashioned stinginess is crossed and becomes a nostrum of corporate policy, the consequences can be grave. This is a hard reality which the Bangalore-based IT heavyweight Infosys Technologies Ltd […]
At the fag end of an undistinguished career in Indian politics, Union human resource development minister Arjun Singh, aka the Raja of Reservations, didn’t get the reservations he wanted most — Congress party tickets for his son Ajeya and daughter Veena to contest from safe constituencies in his Madhya Pradesh bailiwick. This unfair denial of […]
Although the hit feature film Slumdog Millionaire, set in India’s commercial capital has swept Hollywood’s annual Oscar awards bagging prizes for best picture, musical score and sound recording, not a few within the intelligentsia — your editor included — have experienced a peculiar reluctance to view it. By all accounts Slumdog is a gut-wrenching depiction of life in […]
The most important unwritten nostrum of the sycophancy culture of the Delhi durbar, especially of the Congress party, is to suck up and kick down. And that’s the practice followed by the controversial Union human resources development minister Arjun Singh with consummate ease. Recently following a storm after he was reported to have stated that […]
On one issue the usually brain dead scriptwriters and directors of Bollywood and its regional avatars are bang on target: women are the worst enemies of women. In reel life, the greatest persecutors of heroines and indeed any woman endowed with half-good looks, are the scheming mother or sister in-law, and often the neighbourhood killjoy […]
- 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
