April 26, 2008

AS the country faces manifold problems heightened by the incessant rise in prices of essential commodities, an issue that the Opposition parties, notably the BJP, are going to exploit to the hilt to put the ruling coalition in general and the Congress in particular on the mat in the coming elections, what has come as a major and pleasant source of surprise is the MEA spokesman’s summary rejection of US State Department’s deputy spokesperson Tom Casey’s gratuitous advice to India that during (…)

There is an Asian sentiment attached to the Chinese Olympics and most of us strongly share in China’s coming of age and ranking among the top countries of the world. This is also a matter of joy to us in all of Asia. Her extraordinary work-ethic and organisation with which she has risen as an economic superpower is a matter of pride for the entire Third world.
Her politics of one-party rule, with shades of one-man dictatorship born out of the Chinese revolution, though distasteful to (…)

[(COMMUNICATION)]
A statement on Taslima Nasreen’s departure from India, signed by several persons, was published in Mainstream (April 5, 2008). Reacting to it Syed Shahabuddin wrote a letter which was published in Mainstream (April 19, 2008). The following is a rejoinder to the letter by some signatories of the statement.
We have not mentioned anywhere in the statement that Taslima Nasreen is a “stateless person” or a “political refugee” or a “guest of the government”. Shri (…)

From the islands of Japan in the Far East striding across a wide swath or chain of Manchuria, Korea, Mongolia, China and the rolling steppes of Central Asia, carrying with it island clusters, archipelagoes, peninsulas—India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Indo-China, the Philippines and north-westwards through Afghanistan, Iran, numerous other states and territories to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea at Lebanon and Israel is called Asia.
This enormous geographical (…)

Professor Sanaullah Radoo, the Principal of a Degree College in Sopore, Jammu and Kashmir, still remembers the day when his youngest son Pervez had reached the airport in Srinagar in a hurry to catch the next Spicejet flight to Delhi. (September 12, 2006). The moment the flight landed in Delhi, he had even made a call to his Abboo (father in colloquial terms—as he used to fondly call him) informing him that he was rushing to get the boarding pass to the next connecting flight for Pune. (…)

By now discussing advantages and disadvan-tages of establishing Special Economic Zones (SEZs) is nothing new. What is new is that what was being discussed so far in theory and debates has now started to show its consequences in reality. Here is one instance. Pelpa is a small village in Jhajjar district in Haryana bordering Delhi and Gurgaon. A little more than a year ago hundreds of acres of land, belonging to the landed in Pelpa and neighbouring villages, was acquired by the State (…)

The Uttarakhand government is acquiring land all over the State for building, expanding and renewing 98 hydropower projects. With this large-scale activity it seeks to make the State a major powerhouse. Most of these will be, what is called, run-of-the-river projects, generating power from the flow of rivers, without building dams on them. The tiny state will not need all this energy. It will be to promote market economy.
Waters of almost 90 rivers, big and small, including the Alaknanda, (…)

Far from being dead, socialism is as relevant as it’s ever been—its task being to resist the fascism, mayhem and savagery resulting from the inevitable crises of the inherently unstable and self-destructive system of global capitalism.
The soothsayer seeks to predict the future in order to control it. He peers into the entrails of a social system so as to decipher the omens, which will assure its rulers that their profits are safe and the system will endure. These days, he is generally an (…)

Like all academic disciplines, economics has also been continuously engaged in the examination of its definition, nature, scope and significance. This article seeks to give an overview of this from Classical Economics to modern times.
Classical Economics
THE foundations of Economics, more appropriately known as political economy in those days, were laid by the “classical economists” in the wake of rise of industrial capitalism in Great Britain (1760-1820). Adam Smith’s “Enquiry into the (…)

[(BOOK REVIEW)]
The Raj Syndrome by Suhas Chakravarty; Rupa & Co, New Delhi; 2007; pages: 401; price: Rs 395.
As one proceeded to read the book, a metaphor materialised to understand the layers of reality behind the flourish of literary cuisine this work is on British imperial sensibility and Indian detachments. The metaphor is that of the Centaur. It is not because of the grand monumental floor-to-ceiling sight of it at the ground floor of the British Museum or even the (…)