2013

TRIBUTE
Great military commanders have an aura unattainable by others. The last World War threw up a clutch of names that still reverberate in the halls of history—Patton, Montgomery, Rommel (The Desert Fox), Eisenhower, MacArthur, even Tojo, Yamamoto, Yamashita. The Cariappa name glittered in the Indian sky because he was the first Commander-in-Chief.
In glamour value, Thimmayya and Maneckshaw were the heroes. While acknowledging the grandeur of these legendary Generals, we need to (…)

EDITORIAL
The situation in Andhra has considerably worsened in the last few days. The indefinite strike by the Seemandhra electricity workers protesting against the bifurcation of the State and emergence of the separate State of Telangana engendered an unprecedented power crisis that affected other southern States as well. As a consequence the collapse of the southern grid became a distinct possibility which is why the States of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and Puducherry exhorted the (…)

TRIBUTE
General Vo Nguyen Giap is no more. He died in an Army hospital in Hanoi on October 5, 2013 at the age of 102, according to Tuoi Tre Online. The New York Times described him as the “relentless and charismatic North Vietnamese General whose battlefield victory at Dien Bien Phu drove France out of Vietnam and whose tenacious resisance to the United States in a long and costly war there eventually snapped America’s political will to fight”. While offering our heartfelt tributes to one (…)

The following is the written statement delivered by Dr John Dayal, the Secretary-General of the All India Christian Council, at the National Integration Council meeting held in New Delhi on September 23, 2013.
Honourable Prime Minister, Honourable Mrs Sonia Gandhi, Honourable Union Ministers, Chief Ministers and other Members,
Greetings from my community and my organisation, the All India Christian Council, which was founded in 1998 in the wake of large-scale persecution of our (…)

by Arani Basu
The outcome of the Bundestag Election 2013 has hardly come as a surprise. Deutschland wanted Angela Merkel to continue as the head of the country and the results are just a mere reflection of it. However, the USP of CDU’s success lies in the fact that Merkel is all set to outdo the ex-British Prime Minister, the late Margaret Thatcher, with the emphatic victory! Until now, Ms Thatcher was Europe’s longest serving female head of state. But Angela Merkel’s triumph in the (…)

by Kuldip Singh Arora
Armed with facts and documents, member of the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on 2G spectrum Gurudas Dasgupta on September 28, 2013 dissented with the Committee’s draft report, which gave a clean-chit to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, and said that this was a fraudulent and dishonest attempt at cover-up, exonerating these people and throwing all guilt on A. Raja, the then Telecom Minister.
“Raja of course is the villain of (…)

What if Hastinapura were a democracy? All the turmoil about giving half the kingdom to the Pandavas could have been avoided and the matter settled through free and fair elections. The minor irritations of democracy would have persisted—like Duryodhana putting in a fib or two in his affidavit to the Election Commission. But he couldn’t have gone too far. Any attempt to hide his net assets or pending criminal cases would have been exposed by the Crimes Wow news channel with its insider hold on (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
New Delhi’s latest extravaganza is the all-in wrestling match between the President versus the Prime Minister, now being played with their respective supporters backing them with gusto.
But those who are not directly involved in this unseemly game are disturbed by the crisis situation created by this development. This confrontation that now looms large between the President and the Prime Minister has been building up for nearly two years now: what is amazing is that (…)

The government campaigns for the future prospects of Bt cotton1 to boost India’s economy as it is the second largest exporter of cotton. The recent statement in the Lok Sabha on the success story of Bt cotton and call for a ‘sensitive approach’ to Genetically Modified (GM) crops by Sharad Pawar, the Union Minister of Agriculture, has once again raised suspicion about the intents of the UPA II Government. Despite the Reports of the Parliamentary Standing Committee (PSC) on Agriculture and the (…)

WOMEN’S WORLD
by Shruti Chopra
The singular inability of India’s feminist movement to decrypt the coded messages tucked into the aggressive marketing campaigns of giant corporates pushing products and services of subjective “goodness” is bothersome. At one level it implies that the gains achieved by the previous generation of feminists have been frittered away. Since the 1920s, a mix of feminism and feminist-consumerism, which originated in the United States, has inspired Indian (…)