2020

by Ram Puniyani
Pragya Singh Thakur is no ordinary member of BJP, the ruling dispensation in the country. She is a MP from Bhopal and was also made the member of defense committee before she was removed from that committee for her statement hailing Nathuram Godse. She first came to lime light after the Malegaon blasts, in which six people were killed. Hemant Karkare, the police officer who was killed in 26/11 (2008) attack was investigating the case and he came across the fact that the (…)

by Bharat Dogra
Developments in the education sector have generally been discussed in terms of slow or rapid progress. We have been used to saying—yes the access to education of this level has improved but it should have improved more. Now perhaps we are faced with the terrible prospect that access weaker sections to education may be actually declining, even at the elementary level.
In Covid times there have been prolonged closures of schools, which is supposed to be made up by online (…)

All his life he fought valiantly to defend the rights of the people belonging to marginalized sections of society who were persecuted by the State or people who would stand up for their rights and consequently were targeted by the ruling elite but in the end he paid a price for his magnanimity. Surendra Gadling, now in jail in the Bhima-Koregoan violence case, is a human rights lawyer and Dalit rights activist based in Nagpur. He is known for taking up cases of extra-judicial killings, (…)

On August 9, 1925 a group of Indian revolutionaries affiliated to the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA) which included Chandershekhar Azad, Ashfaqullah Khan, Ram Prasad Bismil, Rajender Lahiri, Roshan Singh, Manmathnath Gupt and others waylaid the British Government treasury loaded on a passenger train at Kakori railway station (approximately 20 kilo meters from Lucknow) and captured the same. The then British rulers and their henchmen branded these revolutionaries as terrorists who (…)

December 21, 2020
The recent visits by the army chief General MM Naravane to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia generated some excitement among Indian analysts that a brave new world of ‘military diplomacy’ has dawned. Bombastic coinages such as ‘military diplomacy’ are largely our inheritances from the Americans but when they are bandied about, conceptual clarity is lacking.
Let us not mix up military diplomacy with gunboat diplomacy and coercive diplomacy. In a classic (…)

by K N Ninan
Match-fixing is a malady associated with sporting events such as cricket and football. But what is not known is that this is also true of the academic world especially in the appointment of faculty, administrative staff, Vice-Chancellors, and Directors. Though academic institutions are supposed to be temples of knowledge and excellence the manipulations and power games that take place within these sacred portals will shame everyone. Take the case of social science research (…)

by Aakansha Natani *
Abstract The 21st century began with an intensification of technological advancements in the internet based technologies and as history stands witness, the human race is bound to make further leaps in the development of the same through the passage of this century. Internet has become an integral part of the daily lives of billions of people all over the globe and this is only going to increase overtime. The new set of concerns is emerging all over the world regarding (…)

The report, The horrible history of Big Pharma: Why we can’t leave pharmaceutical corporations in the driving seat of the Covid-19 response, finds that 6 of the biggest corporations in the coronavirus market generated $266 billion last year, with profits totalling $46 billion. Judged by revenue, Johnson & Johnson is more wealthy than rich countries like New Zealand and Hungary. Pfizer’s revenues are bigger than oil-rich Kuwait or Malaysia.

David John Moore Cornwell, better known as the novelist John le Carré, died on the 12 December 2020. He leaves a remarkable body of work. Le Carré came to prominence during the great spy craze of the early sixties. But what distinguished his work from Ian Fleming’s James Bond or Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer was its authenticity, its humanity, and its relevance to reality.
Le Carré was a British spy before he was a writer. As a young man in the late-1940s he put his fluent German to work (…)

November 8, 2018
Social mobility is seen as an essential societal goal – one that occupies most democratic governments. But moving up and down the social ladder can be very stressful, and it is well documented that long-lasting or repeated stress is bad for your health. Until now, though, no one has tried to quantify the health impact of social mobility. In our latest study we set out to redress this knowledge gap. But, before we get to that, a bit of background.
It was a Russian-born (…)