2012

TRIBUTE
by HIRANMAY KARLEKAR
With the recent passing of Prithvis Chakra-varti—Prithvisda to this writer and Prithvis or Chakravarti to his friends and colleagues—the country has lost one of the last tall eminences of the great decades of print journalism. A fine newsman with a keen nose for things that mattered, he was also an uncompromising crusader for journalistic ethics. A strong champion of the principle that a campaign for greater professio-nalism among scribes should accompany the (…)

by TAMANNA KHOSLA
In India, the States of Gujarat and Kashmir have seen a lot of conflict in the past. Kashmir though even now is not free from conflicts of many kinds. Women, men and children in these areas have been affected in the same manner. The pain suffered by them was insurmountable. India is far away from a deliberative democratic state, a form of direct democracy which now is needed to make democracy more participatory. Multicultural states like India do need this kind of (…)

IMPRESSIONS
First, India’s Congress party met, then China’s party Congress met. Don’t see it as just a nice coincidence allowing a nice play on words. The twin events demonstrated yet again how we go in circles while others go forward. The party Congress was a reiteration of China’s capacity to impact the world. The Congress party reiterated its—and the country’s—incapacity to break free of one family’s stranglehold.
Scions of political families, “princelings”, are active in China too. (…)

“Work in the rural base areas does not mean abandoning our work in the cities and in the other vast rural areas which are still under the enemy’s rule; on the contrary, without the work in the cities and in these other rural areas, our own rural base areas would be isolated and the revolution would suffer defeat. Moreover, the final objective of the revolution is the capture of the cities, the enemy’s main bases, and this objective cannot be achieved without adequate work in the cities.” (…)

The winter session of Parliament has opened on November 22 with the apprehension that it could meet the fate of its monsoon session when practically no business was transacted in both the Houses on account of the Opposition’s (read the BJP’s) adamant stand on ‘Coalgate’ demanding the PM’s resignation taking moral responsibility as the Coal Minister for the scam—a demand no government enjoying reasonable majority in the Lok Sabha could ever accede to. The first day of the winter session found (…)

by JAVED ANAND
Dear Justice (Markandey) Katju,
As a former judge of the highest court in the country and as a defender of free expression in your current capacity as Chairperson, Press Council of India, you are understandably outraged by the criminal conduct of the Maharashtra Police in arresting two women from Palghar in Thane district last week for having “dared” to express their disapproval on Facebook of the bandh enforced by Sainiks following Bal Thackeray’s “unacceptable” demise. (…)

There was a time when I felt so proud to be an Indian. I was proud of India’s achievements, especially of our stand in the international field. We were the champions of the Non-Aligned Movement, we took a firm stand on the Palestinian problem in support of Palestinians and my passport had a stamp which forbade me from travelling to Zionist Israel and racist South Africa.
Now I feel deeply disturbed, sad and ashamed of nearly everything India says, does and stands for. Like today (November (…)

by JAYA JAITLY
If India had stood solidly by the forces fighting to restore democracy in Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi may have made this country her first stop when she travelled to receive encomiums around the world. Considering the strong influence of Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings in her life, and her stay here as a student when her mother was Burma’s ambassador to India, it was the obvious first choice. This did not happen, mainly because India shied away from speaking plainly for democracy and (…)

On November 27 this year falls the fourteenth death anniversary of distinguished administrator P.N. Haksar, one of the country’s foremost thinkers. On this occasion we remember him by reproducing an article he wrote in Man and Development (Vol. XIII, No. 4, December 1991), the journal he edited.
In the charmed world of Alice in Wonderland, words can be made to mean anything. Regrettably, outside the Wonderland, words have to be used with utmost care. The context in which a word arises must (…)

by A. RASHID
Dictionaries define a fundamentalist as ‘one who believes in the literal interpretation and the infallibility of the Bible’ as if fundamentalism were unique to Christianity alone. This definition may be modified some day, but, the problem of fundamentalism will continue to torment us. Even the rationalists and the atheists are not free from its evil influence. The literal interpretation of the purpose of life, as suggested by the religious books (pleasing god and striving for (…)