Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Aung San Suu Kyi and Plight of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims

  1 December 2012

  COMMUNICATION
  This letter was sent to us when Aung San Suu Kyi was in India but could not be used earlier due to unavoidable reasons.
  Two persons died in police firing on a rally protesting against the Burmese Government’s genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign that killed and displaced hundreds and thousands of Rohingya Muslims. Now that Myanmar’s Opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is in India and meeting External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid, India, as a neighbour (…)

• Irrefutable Facts

  1 December 2012

  by T.R. KRISHNAN
  Much has been written lately on the delay in completing the process of renovating and modernising the Russian aircraft carrier, Gorshkov, and the cost escalation this delay entails. However, certain basic facts have either been glossed over (unwittingly or otherwise) or have not been taken into consideration due to lack of adequate information.
  This aircraft carrier for the Indian Navy has been equipped with modern high-tech systems alongside elimination of all faults in (…)

• Palestinians’ Plight, Rohingyas’ Predicament, Mumbai Girls’ Harassment

  1 December 2012, by Humra Quraishi

  Seeing shots of complete disaster in the Gaza belt, one is left wondering where are the so-called world leaders who talk of peace! Where is US President Barack Obama, who ought to start his second term by try saving lives of the hapless Palestinians! Where is the United Nations! And where is our own government! One is sitting ashamed and shocked at the muted response to the barbaric killing of the Palestinians. With an irony attached—the Palestinians getting killed and pushed to the edge in (…)

• Threat of Genetic Contamination

  1 December 2012, by Bharat Dogra

  SUPREME COURT PANEL CALLS FOR BAN ON FIELD TRIALS
  It is being widely and increasingly realised that the commercial spread of GM crops or even other GM crops (such as Bt cotton) can be extremely hazardous. What is less widely recognised is that even limited field trials of GM crops can be very risky because of the inherent threat of genetic pollution associated with the use of GM technology in agriculture.
  Fortunately a panel of technical experts, appointed by the Supreme Court, has given (…)

• Aung San Suu Kyi’s Discovery of Nehru

  21 November 2012, by SC

  The grace, dignity, candour and transparency with which she spoke while delivering the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture in the Capital yesterday (November 14), that is, on the occasion of our first PM’s 123rd birth anniversary, indeed marked her out as “one of the most remarkable figures of our time” as Congress chairperson Sonia Gandhi aptly described Burma’s iconic pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Kuu Kyi, extending her a “most heartfelt welcome”.
  For those of us, who have followed (…)

• Obama: New Twist to the ‘Melting Pot’

  21 November 2012, by Sandhya Jain

  At the end of America’s costliest and nastiest electoral battles, widely predicted by analysts to be ‘hung’ like the George Bush-Al Gore encounter in 2000, President Barack Obama made history as the second Democrat President to win a second term in office since the Second World War. By the time his Republican rival Mitt Romney conceded defeat, Barack Obama had beaten a vicious negative campaign funded by the super-rich One Per Cent, who possibly turned the tide in his favour with their (…)

• Agenda for Reforms?

  21 November 2012, by Devaki Jain

  “What’s in a name?” asks Juliet in Shakes-peare’s Romeo and Juliet. “That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet,” she says. (Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)
  But Juliet could not have imagined how the term/name “reform” has not only become a catch all for the kind of pick and pay interventions by the state in the last two decades, but is misleading the doers and the receivers—policy-makers and citizens..
  What is reform? Reform as different from revolution? Reform is (…)

• Their Fathers’ Sons are Rising, but Look Elsewhere for the Real India

  21 November 2012, by T J S George

  IMPRESSIONS
  From Nitin Gadkari to Mamata Banerjee, all politicians describe controversies surrounding them as media creations. Which is like looking at a pimple on your face and calling it a mirror creation. There are other things which are indeed media creations. The idea of the “Rahul Stamp”, for example. First, media mandarins said the Cabinet reshuffle was going to bear the Rahul Stamp. Then they said the Rahul Stamp was missing. Then they found that the Rahul Stamp had in fact worked (…)

• Why Congress Ignored Feroze Gandhi’s Birth Centenary Last Month

  21 November 2012, by Kuldip Nayar

  What has been known as the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, most powerful in India, seems to be dropping the name of Nehru, slowly but gra-dually. Nehru is still there but in a perfunctory manner. It is really Mrs Indira Gandhi who occupies the space. I have noticed the difference. The photos from different Ministries to news-papers on Mrs Gandhi’s death anniversary were larger in number and bigger in size than what appears on Nehru’s death anniversary.
  Therefore, it does not surprise me when the (…)

• Good-bye Feroze

  21 November 2012, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  The following is the short piece by N.C. on Feroze Gandhi during the Emergency in 1976.
  Parliament has just repealed the Parlia-mentary Proceedings (Protection of Publication) Act which came into force twenty years ago in 1956. Late Feroze Gandhi, who initiated and piloted the Bill in Parliament, made a powerful case which might have been useful for the present government to bear in mind. Sri Bhupesh Gupta, in his signed article in New Age of February 1, 1976, has recalled Feroze Gandhi’s (…)