2010

[The following e-mail from S.P. Shukla was read out at a meeting held at the Council for Social Development, New Delhi on October 18, 2010 to offer homage to the memory of S.R. Shankaran. The e-mail was sent to Prof Manoranjan Mohanty in response to the latter’s mail to him giving the sad news of Sankaran’s demise.]
by S.P. SHUKLA
It is hard to recomcile with the fact that S.R. is no more. I came to know of his sudden demise only through this mail. We grew together in the IAS. Right from (…)

S.R. Sankaran (SRS hereafter), the unosten-tatious but remarkable civil servant who passed away recently, was known for his many qualities of head and heart. His simplicity, modesty and commitment to the rural poor was rivalled only by that of Comrade Nripen Chakraborty, the former Chief Minister of Tripura, with whom he had worked as the Chief Secretary. Whether he was posted in Tripura, Andhra Pradesh or the Government of India, SRS was singleminded in his devotion to the welfare of the (…)

The government has decided that Door-darshan and Akashvani will be provided limited financial assistance in future. These services are run by their parent organisation, Prasar Bharati. Presently the deficit in current expenditures is wholly met by the government through budgetary support. It is now decided that only one-half of the current expenditures will be met by the government. Prasar Bharati will have to raise one-half through advertisements. The property being used by the organisation (…)

The co-existence of widespread poverty with high economic growth during the last few years has concerned both policy-makers and academics to get back to what constitutes poverty and where to draw the line below which poverty can be estimated. The concept of poverty line or garibi rekha was introduced by the Planning Commission in the 1960s to identify the poor. It is based on the monetary value required to meet basic needs and is thus revised over the years.1 However, the dividing line is a (…)

I
The Commonwealth Games (CWG) are over. Our revels have ended for now. Many White people have gone satisfied; some even impressed. What might have been a bland and colourless event elsewhere was rendered magical as the hooded cobras put in an appearance to greet the visitors. In which other country would you have pressed Langurs into service to shoo off mere monkeys? You might say that the abiding world of Kipling rendered what might have been the anasthetised efficiency of gadgetry a (…)

[(October Revolution: Ninetythird Anniversary
Seventh November this year will be observed as the ninetythird anniversary of the historic October Revolution. Although the socio-economic system in Russia has been overturned and the once mighty USSR dismantled, the worldwide significance of the Russian Revolution of 1917 has not waned in the least; on the contrary its importance has been heightened in the light of the latest international events that bring out the sole surviving superpower’s (…)

IMPRESSIONS
One Chief Minister, four days, two confidence votes. That certainly puts Karnataka in the history books. But the twin victories are more Pyrrhic than the one Pyrrhus won against the Romans at unsustainably high cost. They have merely proved John Kenneth Galbraith’s theory that television has turned politics into a spectator sport. Honourable Members assaulting security marshals and one honourable Member doing an honourable striptease standing on an honourable desk must have (…)

[(TRIBUTE
Prabhat Kumar Chatterjee, eminent senior Supreme Court advocate, who passed away at his New Delhi residence in the morning of October 28, 2010, was born on October 10, 1922. His father, the late Rai Bahadur A.D. Chatterjee, was a member of the judicial service in Bihar. He completed his graduation from the Government College, Bhagalpur, and went on to do his Law from the Patna Law College. Subsequently he began his law practice in the Patna High Court before coming to Delhi and (…)

BOOK REVIEW
The Warp and the Weft: Community and Gender Identity among Banaras Weavers by Vasanthi Raman; Routledge, New Delhi; 2010; pages 384; Rs 795.
The Warp and the Weft is a serious attempt in building blocs in study of ‘the invisible’ in the mainstream social science discourse. Admittedly the dominant group of watchers of Indian society invariably, because of the perception bias, seem to ignore questions of plurality embedded in the scene, where distinct identities of minorities (…)

The US strategy in Afghanistan is “unsustai-nable”, writes Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times. Why? Because, as he opines, “it is inadvertently financing its adversaries” while simultaneously “backing a corrupt government that drives people to the Taliban”—a kind of double-edged sword. In a way it reflects a lack of policy on the part of the Americans to meet the enormous challenge that the country (which has never been under alien domination and can never be subdued if past history (…)