2010

TRIBUTE
On May 5 it will be six months since Prabhat Joshi left us. Remembering that towering figure in the field of journalism on this occasion, we are carrying the following tribute which brings out yet another facet of his personality. It was written quite sometime ago but could not be published earlier due to unavoidable reasons.
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Prabhash Joshi was one of the most important journalists and thinkers of our times. He was also one of the most controversial. He was a journalist (…)

In the last two years, there has been non-stop coverage in the media and in the diplomatic circles about Bosnia, but very little about the happenings in Afghanistan. From the angle of ethnic conflict, both represent a dimension which needs to be fully grasped while from the strategic point of view, Afghanistan’s historical importance is unmatched.
For a century-and-a-half, Afghanistan has been the battleground of rival Great Powers, so much so that the moves and the counter-moves (…)

With just a few days left for the “jirga” or tribal council to be held in Kabul, the prospects do not look good. Pakistan is determined to torpedo the Afghanistan Government’s plan to work out a societal consensus for ending the war through the traditional means of a consultative assembly. The convening of the jirga, for May 2-4, was a pledge made by President Hamid Karzai in his inaugural address last November. The idea has been viewed favourably by the bulk of the Afghan society. On the (…)

The language used to describe India-China bilateral relations by the media of the two countries is so very different that one sometimes wonders if they are talking of the same thing. The Indian media has been suggesting that whatever activities China was conducting around were dangerous and detrimental to India. For instance, the recent Chinese hint of wanting to open bases overseas has been interpreted in India as its desire to set them up in Pakistan, to encircle and threaten India. (…)

Facebook is becoming a problem for employers at offices in India, as employees have started spending so much time on the social networking site that it is beginning to affect productivity, a new survey has revealed. The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Assocham) have found in their survey that office staffs on average spend an hour a day on sites like Facebook, resulting in a loss of productivity measuring 12.5 per cent.
The study noted: “Close to 12.5 per cent of (…)

Remembering Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on his one hundred and fortieth birth anniversary on April 22, 2010, we are reproducing excerpts from the following article by Jawaharlal Nehru that appeared in The Hindu (April 5, 1928).
‘I know a pair of eyes which have been for ever numbed by the burning sorrow of the Terror,’ said Gorky of Lenin. This sorrow did not leave him to the end. It made him a fierce fanatic and gave him the strength of will to persevere and achieve. But sorrow for the (…)

What was anticipated for quite sometime eventually happened with Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor tendering his resignation from the Union Council of Ministers on April 18 and the PM accepting it. Earlier on the same day Sunanda Pushkar, the business-woman friend of Tharoor based in Dubai, surrendered her Rs 70-crore ‘sweat equity’ in Rendezvous Sports World, the IPL franchisee for Kochi; this she did to save her friend and absolve Tharoor of the charge that he had (…)

The following is the speech CPI leader D.Raja delivered in the Rajya Sabha on April 15 on the Maoist attack on the CRPF’s 62nd Battalion in Chhattisgarh, Dantewada.
Mr Deputy Chairman, sir, at the outset, my Party, the Communist Party of India, condemns the killings of CRPF jawans in the strongest possible terms. My party extends its sympathies to the kith and kin of those victims. Sir, the Home Minister’s statement is a specific statement on the incident in Chhattisgarh. I want to be very (…)

Indisputably enough, India on many a count was a distinguished colony of the British empire. While courting colonial domination over a fairly long span, India—unlike its many peers (for example, the African countries)—happened to have an illustrious heritage of a long-settled civilisation, with a complex social structure and organisation, culture, and religion. Ironically, India’s distinction on this score proved eventually more of a curse as it turned, in the course of a long indirect and (…)

Iran’s recent hyper-activism in neighbouring Afghanistan and Pakistan has caused conster-nation in large parts of the globe. In media circles, think-tanks and world chanceries, highbrowed mandarins and their well-heeled affiliates are trying to make sense of the latest, seemingly inscrutable, piece of the Persian puzzle.
Yet Iran’s deft moves in an area the Persians have known well for thousands of years originate from deeply deliberated and well-grounded funda-mentals. Ever since (…)