2021

Crazy had been gifted to my daughter by the wife of an Army Officer in 2010 when she went to Ranikhet (Uttrakhand) to do some interior designing work at her cottage. She was a seven-day old female pup, a cross breed between a Boxer father and Cocker Spaniel mother. One could guess from her face that she was a Boxer and her hair made Crazy resemble a Cocker Spaniel. My daughter got her tail cut off for reasons best known to her.
Be that as it may, she loved Crazy more than her parents. To (…)

MUSINGS
24 February 2021
Humra Quraishi
Japan has appointed a Minister of Loneliness. As news reports state, this minister’s focus would be to combat loneliness leading to rising suicides. And if I’m not mistaken almost three years back, in 2018, UK had also appointed a Minister of Loneliness to try reach out to all those battling loneliness. Don’t know whether any lessening of the lonely, but it sure does indicate that loneliness is one of those urgent concerns of the governments of (…)

Book Review by Dipak Prakash *
Indian economy’s greatest crisis: Impact of the Coronavirus and the road ahead by Arun Kumar Penguin Random House India Private Limited, 264 pages - Dec 31, 2020
The author Prof. Arun Kumar (well known for his magnum opus Black Economy in India) has attempted to explain how the widow’s cruse is likely to go empty. He succinctly explained why the insane and ill-conceived policy of the government be held responsible, and more so the Modinomics. Voodoo (…)

by M.R. Narayan Swamy
Terror in Islamabad by Amar Bhushan HarperCollins Publishers India; Pages: 171; Price: Rs 250
This is a work of fiction only in name. This is an outstanding even if bone-chilling tribute to an Indian intelligence officer who for three long years fooled Pakistan’s ISI as he ran a network spread all over that country. Unable to digest their failure, ISI bullies abducted and brutally tortured him just before he was to return to India for good. Miraculously, the man (…)

by Mizanur Rahman *
No matter how controversial the political climate in the United States may be, people have never seen a few tech executives shut down a president’s social media access. The decision must be formally approved by the Vice President and Congress prior to taking action. Someone might argue that these media groups are privately owned and can do whatever they want according to the rules of their platform. In my opinion, they cannot, because every company has social (…)

16 December 2020
At first you might miss Stalin in the sea of white flowers and crimson satin; then you spot his waxy dead man’s face, the black moustache that Mandelstam famously, fatally compared to a cockroach. The cadaver turns the heads of a torrent of mourners. Some are in tears, some look anxious or horrified, some wear an expression of awkward indifference, some might be suppressing a smile. There is never any question about what they’re looking at, even when the body is out of (…)

* BJP Seems Nowhere Near Conquering West Bengal| Barun Das Gupta
* Tribute: Shaibal Gupta - A Life Devoted to the Service of Bihar | Muchkund Dubey
* Romance and reality of farming over the years | B S Chauhan

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, Feb 20, 2021
Over the past few years both prominent and little known critics of the Modi government have been targeted by the police at central and state levels in pretty visibly politically motivated cases. There is a growing tendency to file cases under multiple sections of the law and often also on severe charges of sedition. Recently prominent journalists, and a member of parliament, were subjected to harassment when near identical FIRs in several (…)

As these lines are being written, news is pouring in from Punjab that the BJP has been wiped out in the civic elections. It is the Congress which has made a clean sweep, even winning, for the first time in 53 years, it won the Bathinda municipal body. The Akalis had to pay dearly for their past association with the BJP. It had also to kiss the dust. What will be the fate of the BJP in West Bengal where Assembly elections are going to be held in April? Will the party strongman Amit Shah’s (…)

by Arun Srivastava
Upsurge of the kisan mahapanchayats on massive scale in Haryana, Rjasthan and Punjab and broadening the base of the farmers’ movement has not only unnerved the RSS leadership but has also sharpened the contradiction between the Sangh and the Modi government. But to hide its nervousness the Godi media, the Modi government and the BJP-RSS combine has been citing the thinning out of the crowd at the borders as the movement losing the spirit and vigour. To counter the (…)