2012

The world is celebrating the 150th birth aniver-sary of Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore’s creative genius found expression in poetry, novels, short-stories, plays, paintings and essays. In the history of Indian literature, he forms a trinity along with Sanskrit poet and playwright Kalidas and Hindi poet and philosopher Goswami Tulsidas.
The Bengali personality bears the impact of the genius of Rabindranath and he occupies a place of prominence in their homes. Rabindranath, however, has a (…)

THE CENTRE AND TWO STATES ARE EQUALLY RESPONSIBLE
The Mullaperiyar Dam in Kerala built on river Periyar 116 years ago using the then available construction materials and technology has become a matter of raucous controversy between the two contiguous States of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. When the dam was built, its life was determined as 40 years. It was built at the initiative of the then composite Madras province for water for the five districts of the province administered by the paramount (…)

The word ‘depredation’ is being used here deliberately. A movement connotes a large degree of political or social activities or even crusade involving the masses for a definite good purpose. What had been happening in the Junglemahal till the death of Kishenji was a series of individual killings, extortion of money, torture of innocent villagers and forcible recruitment of young men and women for the Maoist cadre. And what were all these for? To increase the area of influence of the CPI (…)

It is now high time to admit that a terrible confusion has gripped the corridors of power in Delhi so far as India’s China policy is concerned. While the top brass of the Army has been cautioning the political leadership against China’s ultimate design, a powerful section of the bureaucracy that includes the National Security Advisor Shiv Shankar Menon now openly main-tains an obsequious attitude towards China. [Recently in a public lecture the NSA was heard saying: “Why create (…)

LOOKING BACK ON 2011
Now that the celebratory mood of the New Year has passed, we can take a cool look at what 2011 did to 2012. It did bad things on the business front: growth slowdown, euro crisis, rupee’s fall and so on. The ill effects of these will continue to haunt much of the world, triggering not only protectionist policies already initiated in America, but also hate crimes in White countries against non-Whites.
The dead year also did something historically portentous: It (…)