Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Why we Won’t Learn from New York

  25 May 2010, by T J S George

  The world will applaud the way America defeated the New York bombing attempt.
  Luck, of course, plays a part in such matters. But in this case no one can deny the skill and professionalism with which the investigators proceeded until they got their man in dramatic style.
  Luck came in the form of a footpath vendor who noticed smoke inside a parked van. It was lucky, too, that he was a Vietnam war veteran who had a fair idea of smokes and fires. It also happened that a mounted police (…)

• The Panj Pyaras of Manu

  25 May 2010, by M.N. Buch

  My Gita, Bible, Quran, Guru Granth Saheb in all temporal affairs is the Constitution of India. This Basic Law, parts of which cannot be amended as per a landmark ruling of the Supreme Court in the Keshvanand Bharti case, binds all Indians to certain fundamentals which we must accept, or cease to be Indians on their rejection. These are contained in the Preamble, reinforced in the Fundamental Rights, amplified in the Directive Principles of State Policy and enshrined in the Fundamental (…)

• Offloading Some Ironies

  25 May 2010, by Humra Quraishi

  Sitting in the midst of this unbearable heat, let me offload some of those ironies that hit and continue to hit. Last week’s stampede at the New Delhi Railway Station is one of those offshoots of complete mismanagement, coupled with two teasers—the concerned Union Minister, Mamata Bannerji, giving those confusing statements from faraway West Bengal; not even bothering to catch the next train to the accident site and then opening or shutting her month. Though, of course, her coming here (…)

• Open Letter to P. Chidambaram

  25 May 2010

  Dear Mr Chidamabaram,
  This is in reference to the press release by the Union Home Ministry which has warned ‘civil society groups, non-governmental organisations, intellectuals and the general public’ to refrain from ‘supporting the CPI(Maoist) ideology’ as it will attract action under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967. It warned that under Section 39 of the Act, “any person who commits the offence of supporting such a terrorist organi-sation with inter alia intention to (…)

• Fallacy of GDP Growth as a Measure of Economic Well-being

  25 May 2010, by B P Mathur

  We have for over a century been dragged by the prosperous West behind its chariot, choked by the dust, deafened by the noise, humbled by our own helplessness, and overwhelmed by the speed. We agreed to acknowledge that this chariot-drive was progress, and the progress was civilisation. If we ever ventured to ask, ‘progress towards what, and progress for whom’, it was considered to be peculiarly and ridiculously oriental to entertain such ideas about the absoluteness of progress. Of late a (…)

• Bhairon Singh Shekhawat Is No More

  25 May 2010, by SC

  Former Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, 86, who was a three-time non-Congress CM of Rajasthan, passed away in Jaipur on May 15 following a heart attack. He headed the first non-Congress government in the State in 1977 and was an able administrator. An ajatashatru in the literal sense of the word, Shekhawat was above petty party politics when it came to upholding the interests of the nation. In this respect there was much in common between him and erstwhile PM A.B. Vajpayee. Both (…)

• Remembering Karl Marx

  25 May 2010

  [May 5 this year marked the one hundred and ninetysecond birth anniversary of Karl Marx. On this occasion we remember that immortal revolutionary with the following excerpts from his unforgettable writings and speeches. —Editor]
  “In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive (…)

• Absence of a Policy-Perspective

  21 May 2010, by SC

  While Conservative leader David Cameron took over on May 11 as Britain’s 53rd PM with the Liberal Democrats’ Nick Clegg as his deputy in the first coalition government in the UK in 65 years, in our country Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh has become another member of the Union Council of Ministers to be suffering from the ‘foot-in-the-mouth’ syndrome. Ramesh’s statement in Beijing that India’s security establishment and Home Ministry were “paranoid”, “alarmist” and (…)

• Shocking!

  21 May 2010, by Nikhil Chakravartty

  The gruesome killing of three—a girl and two young men—at Mehrana, a village near Mathura on the UP-Rajasthan border on March 27 has spread shock waves.
  The inhumanity of the lynching of the three on the order of the village panchayat brings out the grotesque dimension of the prevailing social inequity in our country. The original report said that the girl had eloped with one of the young men, while the other had helped them to go away. The girl belonged to a Jat family while the (…)

• On 65th Anniversary of Victory over Fascism in WW II

  21 May 2010

  (On May 9 this year the world marked the sixtyfifth anniversary of Victory over Fascism, the menace that threatened the entire globe in the forties of the last century. The event was befittingly observed with a spectacular military parade at Moscow’s Red Square on May 9 emphasising East-West military cooperation that helped defeat fascism in Europe—for the first time ever, serving US, British, French and Polish troops as well as servicemen from several former Soviet states joined over 10,000 (…)