2018

It has been distressing for me to notice how the entire space for celebrating Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary by the Government of India has been focusing on toilets: public defecation-free India. In the process of shifting public attention, finances and administrative energy into building toilets (I will not go into the flaws, the failures, the continuation of manual scavenging etc.), and therefore ‘Swachh Bharat’ as the clarion call at this time, Gandhi’s contribution to poverty (…)

In a Mahabharata tale, Dronacharya—who taught the skills of warfare to the Pandava and Kaurava princes—overheard Duryodhana saying that he unjustly favoured Arjuna over others. To prove him wrong, Dronacharya decided to test his pupils, by placing a coloured wooden bird on a branch and asking them to strike it on its eye with an arrow. But before shooting arrows, he asked each in turn what they observed. Yudhishtir said that he saw a wooden bird on the branch, other birds in the tree, and (…)

by Purusottam Bhattacharya
New Delhi finds itself on a sticky wicket at the moment so far as its neighbourhood policy is concerned. (Neighbourhood for the purpose of this article denotes India’s immediate and smaller South Asian neighbours excluding Pakistan.) The Nepalese decision to pull out of the first ever joint military drill by members of the BIMSTEC, as agreed by the seven state grouping in its recent Fourth Summit held at Kathmandu, and Kathmandu’s readiness to participate in a (…)

IMPRESSIONS
It is the irony of ironies that (a) the Government of India banned triple talaq without getting a proper Bill properly passed in Parliament, and (b) Muslims attacked the “reform”, saying that it will not help Muslim women. Who said anything about helping Muslim women? The new law is merely an election-eve move even though its vote-catching potential is doubtful.
Whether it is the Muslim personal law or the newfangled register of citizens, or the convoluted vote-bank politics (…)

by V. Mathew Kurian
I. Introduction
In 2008, America confronted a financial crisis which later spread to other parts of the world making it a global financial crisis. The financial meltdown as a contagion affected adversely the functioning of the real economy, turning it into a ‘great recession’. Ten years are now over by this financial and economic breakdown of the world. In this predicament, it is worth to explore the experience of the global economy during in the last decade. (…)

by Mahendra Ved
At a time when India’s political class as a whole, and the government in particular, leave resolution of many contentious issues to the ‘wisdom’ of the Supreme Court, taking time off, two of its judges, Justices K.M. Joseph and K.M. Mathew, sang for supper, literally, but not theirs. They sang for the marooned people of Kerala.
At a function in New Delhi on August 27, Justice K.M. Joseph sang “Hum Honge Kamyaab”. It is the Hindi version of the original gospel “We Shall (…)

At a time when more and more people in the world are becoming concerned about the serious health risks and numerous other adverse impacts of genetically modified (GM) crops and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the enormously powerful billion-dollar GMO multinationals have tried once again to introduce confusion and uncertainty in public mind by coming up with the concept of gene-edited crops and claiming that these should not be subject to the same restrictions as GM crops. However, in (…)

So perplexing have Shri Mohan Bhagwat’s formulations been with regard to the meaning of being “Hindu” that days after his lecture series one is still struggling to understand, if you like, make sense of what seem some convolutions and conundrums therein.
Since most of us live out our identities on a quotidian level from one day to another, it is important that our self-definitions must have such logical consistency as may enable us to function with a self-confidence born of clarity.
Shri (…)

MUSINGS
During his election campaigns Yogi Adityanath’s speeches carried a particular one- liner, along the strain that under Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Government the State of Uttar Pradesh was turning into another Kashmir!
In fact, it’s today, under the chief ministership of the BJP’s Yogi Adityanath, that one can see strong traces of Kashmir in Uttar Pradesh! Last week’s encounter killings in Aligarh where two young men were shot dead by the State police force and then Apple (…)

by L.K. Sharma
The RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), India’s self-styled “cultural” organisation, whose political wing, the BJP, runs the Union Government, held a public outreach programme designed to soften its image and make itself palatable to the opponents of its Hindu nationalism and sectarianism. That caused a political stir because, as an insider says, this militant Hindu Right-wing organisation, manned by a huge network of paramilitary volunteers, never admits there is anything (…)