Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Going back to Gora

  31 December 2010, by Amiya Dev

  “In May next year the country will observe Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary. The following piece is being carried here as a token of our tribute to that extraordinary personality who, while being rooted in Indian ethos and culture, transcended the barriers of nationalism and attracted several of our national leaders, notably Jawaharlal Nehru, while engaging in lively debates with Mahatma Gandhi. Incidentally the centenary of Tagore’s novel Gora (on which the ariticle is written) (…)

• Meira Paibis: Women Torch-bearers on the March in Manipur

  31 December 2010

  by Shruti Mukherji
  One can trace back the history of today’s Miera Paibis to the days of the Nupi Lan or women’s war in 1904 and 1939. Beginning as a protest against price rise, the demand extended over to administrative reforms against the oppressive economic and administrative policies ruled by the Manipur Maharaja and the Political Agent—Mr Gimson—of the British Government. Women’s role in public sphere is not new to Manipur. Meitei women have enjoyed a significant space outside (…)

• Sharad Patil’s Pathfinding Sautantrik Marxwad

  31 December 2010

  by Madhu Shetye
  What is the path of the democratic socialist system in India? This is a moot problem for this country’s crisis-ridden Left whose politics and ideology are deadlocked. Thanks to their dogmatic bookish non-innovative ideological imprison-ment.
  The exception to this catastrophic crisis of the Left is the leadership of Comrade Sharad Patil who founded his Satyashodhak Marxwadi Party among the adivasis in the rural backward areas of Maharashtra.
  His deep research into (…)

• Korean Peninsula: Looking through the Lenses

  31 December 2010

  by Vaddi Sudhakar
  The Korean peninsula is once again sending an alarm signal to the international community that the region is highly sensitive. The firing of shells between the two Korean nations is a second major incident after the sinking of South Korea’s corvette Cheonan in March 2010. The series of incidents in the peninsula region have led the actors to push towards the brink of waging war in the North-East Asian region, primarily the Republic of Korea (South) and Democratic People’s (…)

• Making Money while Helping the Poor

  31 December 2010, by Nirmalya Biswas

  Introduction
  Is it possible to make money while helping the poor fighting against poverty? In the last ten years or so, at least one business, micro-financing, appears to answer in the affirmative. Micro-finance has been a catchword for a few years now, a panacea for poverty eradication that the poor have all been looking for. It would carry away the poor out of poverty as if by swaying the magic wand of microfinance. The birth of the movement roughly coincided with the rise of the (…)

• Productive Outcome of Sarkozy Visit

  12 December 2010, by SC

  While the 2G spectrum scam takes a new turn with the CBI carrying out nationwide raids on several premises including those of disgraced erstwhile Telecom Minister A. Raja and his close associates among officials and businessmen more than a year after it filed an FIR in that regard, terror has revisited Varanasi with the December 7 blast leaving a one-year-old girl dead and 35 injured (among whom are four foreigners), and the outlawed terror outfit Indian Mujahideen (IM) claiming (…)

• WikiLeaks, US, Pakistan, Afghanistan

  12 December 2010, by Bashir Mohammad

  As the arrested founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange in a signed article in The Australian, titled “Don’t shoot the messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths”, on December 8 called for the “need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth”, there appears to be a fierce competition between two major figures in the “Free World”—US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Republican Sarah Palin (who contested the last 2008 US poll for the post of Vice-President)—in attacking Assange (…)

• Revisiting Obama’s Visit

  12 December 2010

  by Suvrat Raju
  Although the mainstream media collectively swooned on President Barack Obama—when he visited India in early November—and breath-lessly informed its audience about how many rooms he had booked at various five-star hotels, there was little discussion on two key questions. What is Obama’s foreign policy record? Is it consistent with his portrayal as a progressive world leader? Moreover, what impact will his visit have on most Indians?
  Obama’s Foreign Policy
  SUPPORTERS of (…)

• Ensuring Justice to People

  12 December 2010, by R Venkataraman

  ON RAMASWAMI VENKATARAMAN’S BIRTH CENTENARY
  The birth centenary of our former President, Ramaswami Venkataraman (1910-2009), fell last week on December 4. Remembering him on this occasion we are reproducing here a speech he delivered more than 25 years ago—at the inaugural function of the Society for Law and Justice, New Delhi on March 15, 1985. We also reproduce, with due acknowledgement, an appropriate tribute by the country’s leading strategic expert that appered in The Indian Express (…)

• The Copy-book President

  12 December 2010, by K. Subrahmanyam

  President R. Venkataraman, whose 100th birthday falls today, called himself a copy-book President, and compared the role of the Indian presidency to that of an “emergency light” which comes into play only when needed. His style of functioning as a copy-book President was in sharp contrast with that of his predecessor, during whose last two years in office Delhi was rife with rumours of his attempts to dismiss an elected Prime Minister with a massive majority in the Lok Sabha.
  Though (…)