Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Open Letter to Our Dear Brothers in Pakistan

  12 December 2010, by Shree Shankar Sharan

  REMEMBERING MUMBAI 26/11
  On the second anniversary of the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai we remember the martyrs of those refarious assaults and reproduce the following piece that appeared in Mainstream (December 6, 2008) since it embodied one of the rare voices of sanity raised in this country following the 60-hour trauma India’s
  commercial capital had to experience from November 26 to 29, 2008.
  Our dear brothers in Pakistan,
  In the intense grief that I am in due to the mindless (…)

• Why is an Alternative Political Party Needed and What will be its Essentials?

  12 December 2010, by Bharat Dogra

  I would like to take forward the debate initiated by Sumanta Bannerjee’s letter to the national stage. Here I try to answer two basic questions:
  1. Why is an alternative political party needed when so many political parties already exist?
  2. What are the essential, non-negotiable characteristics of this alternative political party?
  Let me take up the first question first A genuinely alternative political party is needed not only in India but in most democracies as the main political (…)

• Niira Radia Tapes and the Stench

  12 December 2010

  MEDIA In the wake of the Niira Radia tapes, now in circulation due to the publication of their operative parts in the Open Magazine and Outlook, a series of commentaries on the role of the media and today’s journalists have appeared in the print media. One of the sharpest critiques of that role has been published in the Pakistani publication, Dawn. In view of the importance of the subject being discussed we are reproducing it, with due acknowledgement, for the benefit of our readers. Jawed (…)

• Glamour is not Credibility

  12 December 2010, by T J S George

  MEDIA
  Journalism started going astray with the birth of financial dailies in the 1960s. With full-fledged newspapers devoted exclusively to business, corporate houses became hyperactive. The next thing we knew was press conferences ending with gifts of expensive sarees and suitlengths to reporters.
  That was innocent child play compared to what has hit the headlines now—charges of celebrity journalists working hand in hand with a professional lobbyist to fix things like Cabinet (…)

• Karat’s ‘Poverty of Philosophy’ and Indian Left on the Kerala Scene

  12 December 2010, by K G Somasekharan Nair

  While delivering the Victor Kiernan Memorial Lecture in Cambridge University on October 23, Mr Prakash Karat, General Secretary of the CPI-M, said: “Kiernan who lived in British India between 1938 and 1946 often criticised Communists for their lack of interest in theory.” Karat admitted this deficiency and quipped that the Left in India was still banking on the concepts and theories of the 1940s.
  (New Indian Express, Thiruvananthapuram, October 24, 2010)
  This author had ratiocinated that (…)

• Exposing Churchill’s Role in Bengal Famine 1943

  12 December 2010

  BOOK REVIEW
  by Firdaus Ahmed
  Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II by Madhusree Mukerjee; Tranquebar Press, Chennai; 2010; pages 352; Rs 495.
  India’s most widely read historian, Ram-chandra Guha, rightly praises Mukerjee’s book as ‘a major contribution to Indian history and to the history of the Second World War’. The author has convincingly laid the blame for the Bengal Famine 1943 and the resulting three million deaths at (…)

• Incorporating Political Theory in the Study of Corporate Management

  12 December 2010, by Sunita Samal

  In the beginning, management education was concerned with industries and corporate bodies. Next, it was dominated by academicians and lastly it emphasised on customer satisfaction and business ethics. Corporate management has been primarily value creation. Managerial problems cannot be segregated under disciplinary boundaries. Politics can be found in all places including corporate management where inter-personal relations are involved. Decision-making by the corporate management is (…)

• Massive Mandate for Nitish Kumar

  1 December 2010, by SC

  As mega scams get unearthed one after another starting with the serious irregularities in the Commonwealth Games and Mumbai’s Adarsh Housing Society (meant for the families of the Kargil martyrs but regrettably cornered by the kin of not just leading politicians but also high-ranking retired military officers including a former Chief of the Army Staff) as well as the fraud perpetrated around the 2G spectrum, the latest being the multi-crore corporate loans scam, several important public (…)

• Dalai Lama’s Simple Words and Our Silence

  1 December 2010, by Humra Quraishi

  As scams get unearthed you can well imagine what lies ahead.Dark patches are getting darker, disillusionments are turning into nightmares, those disparities are widening,and hopelessness looms large.The crux is: the mess is getting messier. And yet there is that lingering hope that perhaps sense and sanity might prevail.
  In fact, last week-end as I sat hearing the Dalai Lama talk on the human approach to world peace, at the Institute of Social Sciences, those simple thoughts and simpler (…)

• Seoul Summit: The Real Test for G-20

  1 December 2010, by Muchkund Dubey

  The fifth Summit of the G-20 was held in Seoul on November 11-12, 2010. Before that, the G-20 had met four times at the summit level in quick succession during a period of a little over a year- and-a-half. The Seoul Summit was the first meeting of the leaders of the G-20 held in a country other than the advanced industrial countries constituting the G-7. The first three summits held during the peak of the global financial and economic crisis had achieved notable success in collectively (…)