2015

How do you reflect on those unforgettable days of August 1942 after fifty years?
Aruna Asaf Ali: Gandhiji’s ‘Do or Die’ message and his statement that every person is his own leader thrilled the masses and some of us. A few of us decided that going to jail was no way of serving the national cause. So we thought we’ll stay out of jail and lead the masses in the ‘Do or Die’ battle.
That’s how we then felt. We did not kill people for the sake of killing but we decided that we would upset (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
Generations spanning over centuries have been told that the French Revolution devoured its own children. In a sense, this could be said also of the Russian Revolution in which many of its heroes had themselves to face the firing squad.
There is however the other side, the heroic aspect of every revolution as it throws up leaders, and these in turn try to carry forward the revolution itself. Aruna Asaf Ali was one of these beautiful children reared by the Indian (…)

One more link with the past has gone,
One more patriot gone to rest forever,
United with history in the journal of her life.
O, Aruna Asaf Ali, I salute you
For your tireless wanderings
Through the maze of revolution,
But never faltering even though
Your comrades locked you out at journey’s end.
Som Benegal
July 31, 1996 (Mainstream, August 10, 1996)

The following letter reached us late. We are thus belatedly publishing it for the benefit of our readersin general and Kobad Ghandy’s friends and relatives in particular.
This is to thank you all ever so much for the support you rendered, in so many ways, against the harassment I have been facing since the past nine months due to routine three-four monthly jail transfers.
This method of routine jail transfers is a notorious weapon of harassment (earlier used as a form of punishment), (…)

by Bharat Dogra, Jagmohan Singh and Reena Mehta
There has been a growing awareness in recent years that rise in the GDP need not necessarily be associated with increasing real welfare. This realisation led to efforts to prepare other indi-cators of welfare such as the Human Develop-ment Index (HDI) incorporating health, education and other important features in addition to income. However, even such improvements may not be adequate as multidimensional distress conditions may deteriorate (…)

by A.V.V.S.K. Rao
“Two things are infinite:The Universe and human stupidity andI’m not sure about the Universe.”—Albert Einstein(1879-1955)
I
When India attained independence in 1947 the then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wanted to make the country wealthier by encouraging development of modern heavy industries. He had strong support from elite groups in the Indian National Congress and some leading industrialists coming from feudal background. The new political elite brought to (…)

The Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA), Mussoorie dispatched 150 of us—all 1973 batch IAS officers—to different directions all over the country to report to the respective State governments for duties. This brought an end to a two-year institutional and field training. The field training involved a fortnight of Army attachment starting December 27, 1973 under the tent in a sector where the temperature dipped to subzero in Jammu. From Mussoorie all of us proceeded (…)

Over the years, I have found the Supreme Court in Pakistan, a country under constant influence of the military, is far more progressive than ours although India has been functioning in a free, democratic environment. Not long ago, lawyers in Pakistan fought and won the battle for supremacy of the Chief Justice who was sequestered and suppressed by the Army Chiefs like Zia-ul Haq and Pervez Musharraf.
Once again, the Pakistan Supreme Court has made us see our face in the mirror. In an (…)

by Arun Srivastava
In the seventies when the message from Naxalbari was spreading fast to other parts of India and the police, especially the Calcutta Police, was brutally killing youths and students, particularly those from Presidency College and Jadavpur University, on the plea of being Naxalites at the directive of the Congress Government headed by Siddhartha Shankar Ray, a theatre group had produced a play Football which depicted the craziness of the Bengali people towards football at (…)

by Abhijit Chakraborty
The recent discussion on Food and Nutrition aspects in India is related to the growing paradox in relation to the declining calorie consumption known as the calorie consumption puzzle. But the debate sometimes tries to overlook the larger problems of some select population groups and their anthropometric data in relation to calorie consumption. This paper in its limited aim has tried to figure out one such problem in the State of Kerala which is known as God’s own (…)