September 2009

The violation of the India-China border by the Chinese Army near the 22,000 feet high Mount Gya in Jammu and Kashmir at the trijunction of Ladakh, Spiti and Tibet in late July, painting the rocks there in red and writing “China” on them in Cantonese is the latest incident in a series of provocative acts by the Chinese Army against India. In fact, China has been adopting an ominously aggressive anti-India posture for quite some time now.
Even as Indian and Chinese officials met in New (…)

“What happens from here on is no longer a question of ideological oppositions, but a struggle for global reality. There are two global realities, resembling in a nonrepresentational way the old programmatic realities of East and West: the imaginary electronic globe, and the poetic-specific-eco-community.
“The poet’s job is to short-circuit the imaginary globe.”
—Romanian writer Andrei Codrescu in
The Disappearance of the Outside: a Manifesto for Escape
Like the East (…)

Tragedy has struck the Congress and the nation once again. Perhaps the best Chief Minister of the country in terms of dynamism, political acumen and administrative efficiency, the Andhra Pradesh CM, Dr Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, 60, met with an untimely death when his chopper crashlanded on a hillock in deep forests some 49 nautical miles east of Kurnool in the morning of September 2, 2009 due to inclement weather (although his body as well as the bodies of the other four passengers of the (…)

In Burma resides a dame,
Terra Firma is her name;
They lock her indoors,
But her pitying smile soars,
And the Generals are rendered lame.
Thomas Carlyle, that prophetic voice of the 19th Century, delineated in Heroes And Hero Worship (1841) what he thought were types of world-historical individuals.
Among them he projected Cromwell as a type of hero whose strength lay in a species of obdurate conviction that had no need of any flamboyant oratorical (…)

The Union Ministry of Education is toying with the idea of setting up a few ‘world-class’ national universities, and to that effect a concept note has been circulated. It is titled ‘Brain Gain’, meaning retrieval of the brain that has gone overseas.
There was a time when we talked of ‘Brain Drain’ feeling helpless about the migration of some of our better brains. Various reasons were in the air for that phenomenon: lack of adequate research facilities, red tape, neglect of merit and (…)

The news that hit the headlines when the Orissa Assembly was in session in July last was the resistance of the Opposition to the Education Bill that sought the approval of the House for the opening of the three new private universities, namely, the Vedanta University, the Sri Sri University and the ICFAI University which would adopt the state-of-the-art technology in imparting education to the students. The State’s initial decision to give away ten thousand acres of land to the Vedanta (…)

The ordinary meaning of education is knowledge of letters. To teach boys reading, writing and arithmetic is called primary education. A peasant earns his bread honestly. He has ordinary knowledge of the world. He knows fairly well how he should behave towards his parents, his wife, his children and his fellow villagers. He understands and observes the rules of morality. But he cannot write his own name. What do you propose to do by giving him a knowledge of letters? Will you add an inch to (…)

Despite a high risk of being ridiculed or even frowned upon by others, I just cannot help putting across a distinct scepticism against the incessant flow of technical innovations for newer and newer consumer goods and gadgets in our contemporary times. While saying this, I do not, of course, refer to the pure, fundamental, and sometimes even epoch-making scientific inventions and technological progress. In fact, I am perfectly alert and appreciative of the profound benefits to modern (…)

I visited Kandhamal for three days starting from June 20, 2009. Apart from NGOs, the Superintendent of Police, the leaders of the Church (Catholic and non-Catholic), I also met with inmates of eight camps.
To start with, it is important to clearly understand why and how the atrocities occurred. It is unsubstantiated propaganda that the origins of the atrocities are best understood by ascertaining the “root causes”. According to such propaganda the “root causes” are the efforts of (…)

Whatever explanation may be trotted out by the External Affairs Ministry, there is no escape from the fact that the country has suffered a humiliating defeat in the race for a non-permanent member seat in the UN Security Council.
There will be pundits who will ascribe the poor Indian score to our refusal to sign the CTBT which the government rightly decided for the country. This school of thought seems to argue that had India voted for the CTBT, the US would have condescended to back (…)