2012

Dear Dr Kalam,
You are one of the most popular ex-Presidents of the Republic of India, the home of one-sixth of humanity. As such, you enjoy high respect at home and abroad. Your eagerness to ignite people’s minds is universally acclaimed. Your interaction with the student community is a great source of inspiration for all of us.
You are a world class missile engineer. Your leadership of the defence research and develop-ment projects was excellent. For all these records, you are an (…)

The Commonwealth Games, Delhi 2010, a 12-day extravaganza left an enduring imprint of India’s rising capabilities as a sporting nation. In the meanwhile “the government has made a necessary change in the eligibility criteria for a person getting the India’s highest civilian honour”1 in any field of “human endeavour”. There have been extensive discussions and media campaign for conferment of Bharat Ratna favouring certain sports personalities. Strangely, not once did the Indian media, print (…)

COMMUNICATION
The debate initiated by Mr Ather Farouqui in Mainstream through his seminal piece ‘Indo-Pak Relationship and Urdu: Companions in a Paradoxical Syndrome’ (Mainstream Vol L, No 1, December 24, 2011 (Annual 2011) regarding the inactive—rather defunct—literary organisations of the Left is particularly relevant at a time when atavistic forces are hell-bent on strangling any dissenting voice and want to hang whoever writes something that does not conform to their agenda. In such a (…)

Tell me from where to start off, to begin webbing details to the spread around! Murkier getting each single aspect—whether those scams, or those age rows of ageing Generals or babies lying battered or curtains getting drawn on the very screening of potently relaying documen-taries like Jashn-e-Azadi. Why can’t we see those realities that Sanjay Kak has focused on in his film—Jashn-e-Azadi? Why was its screening called off at a Pune educational institute? Why can’t the rest of India know (…)

BOOK REVIEW
Catching Up with Gandhi by Graham Turner; 2010; pages 344; Rs 350. Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld; Harper Collins Publishers; 2011; pages 452; Rs 699.
More than sixty years after Mahatma Gandhi has left the scene, two of his biographies have appeared—one by Graham Turner, a British journalist, and the other by Joseph Lelyveld, a journalist in America. What purpose do they serve? Do they tell us anything remarkable to enable a (…)

“The condition of England at present is pitiable. I pray to God that India may never be in that plight. That which you consider to be the Mother of Parliaments is like a sterile woman and a prostitute. Both these are harsh terms, but exactly fit the case.” —Gandhiji
The cruel buffooneries of the English Parliament started in the term of King Henry VIII (1509-47) who inaugurated Reformation in England through his immoral life. He decided to divorce his wife, Catherine Aragon, to marry Anne (…)

Exactly a year ago, on the eve of our sixtysecond Republic Day, it was written in these columns:
...if one speaks of the political class, there is hardly any political leader of the Right, Centre or Left worthy of emulation in today’s India. They have all compromised themselves... At the same time the country is inexorably hurtling towards full scale polarisation resulting in political confrontation between the Treasury Benches and Opposition in Parliament where the winter session saw the (…)

On January 30 this year falls the sixtyfourth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. On this occasion we remember the Father of the Nation by reproducing excerpts from a piece that Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in homage to the pioneer of our freedom struggle three years after Gandhiji’s demise.
What gods there are, I know not; and I am not concerned about them. But there are certain rare qualities which raise a man above the common herd and make him appear as though he were of different (…)

If the combined Opposition had sat down for weeks so as to find an issue to embarrass the UPA Government and make it a laughing stock before the whole country, they could not have thought of a better issue than the free gift presented to it by the UPA Government by initially insisting that it had irrevocably decided to allow the entry of multi-brand retail leader superstores like Walmart, USA and then, within a few days, withdrawing the proposal with a whimper.
As it is, even initially (…)

The Comptroller and Auditor General’s Report on the 2G Spectrum has created a great deal of controversy and his role is being questioned. The Public Accounts Committee could not finalise its report due to the splitting on the issue on party lines. The JPC currently examining the matter has taken an unprecedented step of taking evidence of a junior officer of the CAG’s set up, since retired, and quizzed the CAG about the manner of calculating the loss in the deal. It has asked the Finance (…)