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'Raja used wife's a/c to stash bribe money in Mauritius and Seychelles' - Dhananjay Mahapatra, The Times Of India
The CBI is believed to have gathered evidence of former telecom minister A Raja using his wife's bank accounts in Mauritius and Seychelles to deposit part of the Rs 3,000 crore bribe he allegedly took for favouring telecom companies with 2G spectrum.
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Who is Hassan Ali Khan? - Headlines Today
Hassan Ali Khan, son of a Hyderabad excise officer, is a scrap dealer with an annual income of Rs 30 lakh. He has a Swiss bank account with $8 billion in deposits. This figure has been verified by India Today from a letter written by UBS, Zurich, to Khan. The government of India has confirmed the existence of this account in UBS, and ordered him to pay Rs 50,000 crore in tax on that wealth. Khan has not paid a rupee.
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Vote For Baba Ramdev? - Sheela Reddy, Outlook
Last year, when India’s most popular yoga guru Baba Ramdev announced his plans to launch a national party, few took him seriously, ridiculing him as a PT instructor with an ambition that would send him tumbling on his wooden clogs. But his recent series of public rallies, including the one last week at the Ramlila maidan in Delhi, where he’s drumming up support for his drive against corruption and black money, is sending chills down the spines of several political parties.
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The Great Telecom Fudge - Arun Shourie, Indian express
‘Taan Shourie Saab, hun ki karn da irada hai?’ Giani Zail Singh asked. So, what do you plan to do now?
There had been another turn in my life. I had gone to call on Gianiji.
‘Sir, ki karana? Kitaabaan hi likhniyan. Kitaabaan likhanga’ — Sir, what is there to do? I will write books, I said.
‘Naeen, naeen,’ No, no, Gianiji said, ‘Tuseen samjhe hi naeen’ — You haven’t understood.
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Stale upma for the UPA - Cho Ramaswamy, Hindustan Times
The Congress and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) have patched up. But that doesn't mean we should forget that the two alliance partners were never too friendly to begin with. There has been much acrimony at the cadre level, with the DMK refusing to share power in Tamil Nadu despite depending on the Congress for its survival.
Despite several attempts by local Congressmen, M Karunandhi had rebuffed such a deal throughout the last five years the DMK has been in power in Chennai. At the Centre, he wanted a share of the pie that included specific portfolios. It is this behaviour in Delhi and another attitude in Chennai that irritated the Congress a great deal.
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UPA government's credibility is in a shambles - Lal Krishna Advani, L K Advani's Blog
About two decades back the Telegraph of Calcutta had published a longish interview with me. I was B.J.P. President at the time. The interviewer was its Special Correspondent, Manini Chatterji. Today, she is Editor, Current Affairs, in the same paper. An unusual question Manini had posed to me in that interview was “What is the one word that appeals to you most in your life?” My reply was: “Credibility”. Whatever I am, and whatever I have been able to do for my country and for my party is because of the credibility I have earned in my life. Then, it is not only my personal credibility, but also my party’s.
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Vadra makes entry into real estate - Rohini Singh & Sruthijith KK, The Economic Times
New Delhi-based entrepreneur Robert Vadra, married into the country?s most powerful family, has made a quiet and relatively unheralded entry into the real estate business, including a partnership with DLF Ltd. India?s largest realty firm. Vadra, the son-in-law of the ruling United Progressive Alliance coalition chairperson Sonia Gandhi , has stayed away from electoral politics, maintaining that he wants to be known as a businessman.In interviews, he has said that his focus is on Artex , a small company specialising in jewellery and handicraft exports.
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Revealed: The India cables from wikileaks - N Ram, The Hindu
The Hindu offers its readers a series of unprecedented insights into India's foreign policy and domestic affairs, diplomatic, political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual – encountered, observed, tracked, interpreted, commented upon, appreciated, and pilloried by U.S. diplomats cabling the State Department in Washington D.C. The range of subjects, issues, and persons covered by the India Cables is extraordinary.
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Why India Might Save the Planet - Jeremy Kahn, Newsweek
If you had to name a most valuable player of December’s climate summit in Cancún, hands down the award would go to Jairam Ramesh. His Mexican hosts, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and ministers from small island-nations such as the Maldives and Kiribati all hailed India’s 56-year-old environmental minister for salvaging the entire endeavor.
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Earthquake there, aftershocks here - Amitabh Sinha, Financial Express
India currently operates 20 nuclear reactors, only one of which (Narora in UP) is located in a seismically active area. Six more are under construction and several more planned. Depending on susceptibility to earthquakes, places are classified into different zones, with zone 1 being the least susceptible and zone 5 the maximum. Nowadays, no place is classified as zone 1, and it is considered that every location would have some chance of getting an earthquake sometime. Narora is located in a zone 4 area, while the rest of Indian reactors are in zone 2.
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Hasan Ali laundered money for 3 former Maharashtra CMs - Aditi Raja, India Today
Hawala trader Hasan Ali's $ 8 billion (about Rs 36,000 crore) network of illegal money transactions is unravelling. On Saturday, Ali revealed to agencies probing his accounts that a substantial portion of the thousands of crores in his Swiss bank and other accounts elsewhere belonged to top Indian politicians and bureaucrats, including three former chief ministers of Maharashtra.
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The spectre of India’s Fukushimas - Brahma Chellaney, Live Mint
The controversial Indo-US nuclear deal was pushed through without building “the broadest possible national consensus” that the prime minister had promised. Now, the unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan is helping to turn the spotlight on India’s nuclear safety and its moves to push through major reactor imports without a competitive bidding process.
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NAC vs Government - Business Standard
There is a fundamental inequality in the governance arrangement in New Delhi that continues to plague the United Progressive Alliance. Members of Congress party president Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council feel they have the right to criticise the government and its functionaries all the time, while no one in government is willing to return the compliment. In an interview to this newspaper, (March 13) the self-proclaimed father of India’s green revolution, Dr M S Swaminathan, hurled invectives against planning commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia and the newly appointed chairperson of the Commission on Agricultural Costs and Price (CACP) Ashok Gulati.
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Balwa, father have D-Links: Agencies - Josy Joseph, Times of India
The security establishment has several specific details to link Shahid Balwa, his father Usman Ebrahim Balwa, Vinod Goenka, his father Krishna Murari and brother Pramod Goenka to the Dawood gang and Chhota Shakeel. Shahid Balwa and Vinod Goenka are currently in jail in connection with the 2G scam. Over the past seven-eight years, there has been a stream of inputs on the underworld links of both the families, a senior official said.
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The wages of populism - Deepak Lal, Business Standard
In the late 1980s, along with Hla Myint, I co-directed a large comparative study of 21 developing countries of The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity and Growth (Oxford, 1996). One of our surprises was that two of our largest countries — Brazil and Mexico — which had three decades of spectacular growth suffered prolonged “growth collapses” in the 1980s.
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But, Manmohan is an honourable man! - Chandan Mitra, Pioneer
Three trust motions over the last 20 years went down to the wire. PV Narasimha Rao survived the first in 1993 by seven votes, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee lost in 1999 by one vote and Mr Manmohan Singh managed to cross the halfway mark by three in 2008. The outcome of other recent trust votes, however, were either predictable (such as ‘humble farmer’ HD Deve Gowda’s comical “old man in a hurry” taunt of 1997), or voting never happened, as in the case of Mr Vajpayee’s 13-day Government in 1996 when he quit after a memorable flourish of rhetoric.
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A ship about to sink - Pritish Nandy, Times of India
Luckily for the UPA, there was always Singh to fall back on. Most middle class Indians refuse to be cynical. We know exactly what’s happening around us, we criticise it constantly, but when it comes to the crunch we all rally around the nation and the flag. We are not bat-brained paranoids. Neither are we wide-eyed innocents ready to buy into every ridiculous explanation thrown our way to explain the loot that’s taking place in broad daylight. But the latest season of scams has flummoxed all. This is not just Alibaba and his chaalis chors. Everyone among the chaalis chors is another Alibaba with his own chaalis chors. That’s the way the pyramid of crime operates today. But because Singh, soft spoken and self effacing, is the face of this Government, India has kept faith.
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K Klutch Klan - Rohini Mohan, Tehelka
In the summer of 1991, in a crowded political rally in Patna, thousands stirred impatiently as a portly Muthuvel Karunanidhi, in dark glasses, white shirt and dhoti, walked up to the podium. Expecting the chief minister of Tamil Nadu and leader of the Dravidian movement to speak in nothing but chaste Tamil, people settled down to catch a few winks before the good Hindi stuff would begin. Unfazed, Karunanidhi adjusted the mike down to his height, cleared his throat and said in perfect English: “Before I proceed with my speech I would like to introduce myself,” he said. “My name is Karunanidhi. I am anti-national... I am a dangerous person to this country.”
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Dawood threat to CBI HQ? - Rajesh Ahuja, Hindustan Times
A few days before the mysterious death of Sadhick Batcha in Chennai, the CBI was passed on information in Mumbai that Dawood Ibrahim’s D Company might target the probe agency headquarters to destroy the 2G scam papers. After getting this information, the CBI top brass immediately swung into action to put more security measures in place at its headquarters here.
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One-stop sop: Jaya’s ADMK superstore - Swati Das, The Pioneer
Tamil Nadu’s ‘sop’ opera reached a crescendo on Thursday when the AIADMK released its manifesto for the April 13 Assembly election. It out-matched rival DMK’s poll promises and unveiled a mind-boggling range of freebies that the people of Tamil Nadu can lay their hands on if the party is voted to power. Interestingly, at least one among these was a disguised threat of action against Jayalalithaa’s political rivals.
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India-born lawyer leads Wall Street clean-up - Chidanand Rajghatta, Times of India
For some, he's the scourge of Wall Street; for others, he's the sheriff of the financial district. And don't forget his targeting of terrorists. Preet Bharara's journey to prosecutorial limelight in New York City's battle against terrorism and white collar shenanigans is built on a spotless reputation paved with professional élan and political rectitude. Bharara, who is the US Attorney for the South District of New York, represents a small but growing body of professionals of Indian origin in the US who are on the law-enforcement side of the divide.
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Singh singed - The Economist
Somehow he remains a figure of unruffled equanimity. As members of parliament erupt, banging their desks and screeching with rage, Manmohan Singh sits stiff, silent and smiling. For the past week opposition parties—the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lined up unusually with the Communists—have been in a frenzy, accusing the prime minister of lying to parliament and of dismally weak leadership. They have repeatedly called on Mr Singh (pictured here with the BJP’s Lal Krishna Advani) to quit. For the moment, he is going nowhere.
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Jaya on way to convincing win in Tamil Nadu - K Balakrishnan, LensOnNews
An exclusive opinion poll commissioned by the newly-launched website LensOnNews.com predicts a dramatic comeback in the Tamil Nadu assembly elections by the AIADMK combine.The Jayalalithaa-led alliance is projected to win a tally of 144 seats in the 234 member strong state assembly, which is well above the halfway mark of 117 seats. The DMK combine, despite an impressive line up of alliance partners, is trailing behind and may end up with a tally of 88 seats.
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J&K: Truth lost in translation - SK Sinha, Asian Age
As regards Kashmir reverting to pre-1953 status, (w)hat is being demanded implies permits for other Indians to enter Kashmir, for the Indian flag to not be flown in Kashmir, for the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, Election Commission and Comptroller and Auditor General to be withdrawn from Kashmir, a Prime Minister for the state and no IAS or IPS officers in Kashmir. In other words, it involves breaking political links with India as far as possible while continuing with maximum economic assistance from New Delhi, and, while demanding maximum autonomy at the state level, letting autonomy at the regional and panchayat levels remain neglected.
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Cricket Diplomacy: Gilani helps UPA to shift focus from scams - Economic Times
The past six months have been particularly bad for the Manmohan Singh government, and the Congress, which have seen the hype surrounding their comfortable victory in the 2009 general election give way to despair and popular disenchantment, thanks to the eruption of a series of scandals, its failure to rein in prices of essential commodities, especially food items, and the resurrection of the Telangana statehood agitation. The government's credibility and image took a severe knock with the Opposition taking it to task for goofing up on vital issues. By inviting his Pakistani counterpart Yousaf Raza Gilani to watch the ICC World Cup semi-finals featuring teams of the two countries at Mohali, Singh has made a determined bid to wrest the initiative, at least in the foreign policy turf.
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Fighting imported corruption - Devesh Kapur & Arvind Subramanian, Business Standard
The anger that we feel against today’s “elite” bribe-takers in India comes with a major question: where does that money go? How are such massive amounts of ill-gotten wealth laundered without being easily traced? When Sukh Ram took his cut, he could still put it in suitcases, but when Madhu Koda raked it in, the sheer volume meant he had to be much more creative. Benami land transactions and real estate purchases are possible, but large and frequent purchases are not easy to hide. Discreet foreign jurisdictions have, therefore, become the preferred destination for bad money.
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Rethinking Pakistan - Bharat Karnad, The Asian Age
“Cricket diplomacy” and the meeting of the Indian and Pakistan home secretaries are important because these were approved through the back channel maintained by Delhi with the Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani — the hub of power in Pakistan. Whatever one may think of the Pakistan Army, it is a professional force driven by cold calculation. If it thinks it can get away with some outré action or the other against India, it does not hesitate to prosecute it (think Kargil).
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Cricket World Cup final - Jonathan Agnew, BBC
India's opening partnership is the most intimidating in world cricket. Virender Sehwag can tear any attack apart. He is audacious, takes risks and has fantastic hand/eye co-ordination. Then, at the other end is Sachin Tendulkar, who is quite simply the best batsman in the world. He just gets on and plays, and sets out to bat through the innings and score a hundred. I think Sehwag and Tendulkar will outgun the Sri Lankan opening pair, who are of course not bad players themselves! Tillakaratne Dilshan is innovative and scores quickly, while Upul Tharanga is neat and well organised - and left handed. It is always useful to have a left/right hand combination. My concern for Dilshan and Tharanga is that they have played almost entirely on Sri Lankan pitches in the tournament and will not be so used to the subtle differences in the wicket, the ball coming on to the bat a bit more.
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The world at our feet - Vikas Singh, Times of India
The wait has ended, and a new legend has been born. Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his intrepid warriors now stand atop a pedestal hitherto occupied only by Kapil's Devils, and India has become only the third country after Australia and the West Indies to win the World Cup more than once. The glorious images of this magical evening at Mumbai are destined to be replayed millions of times on TV and the Net, and no matter what happens in Dhoni's remarkable career from here, his place in the Indian cricketing pantheon is assured. Meanwhile, all of India exulted lustily on Saturday night, and the celebrations are going to continue for a long, long time. This, after all, is a party that was 28 years in the making.
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Murder on the EU express - Niall Ferguson, Newsweek
You remember Agatha Christie’s classic whodunit Murder on the Orient Express? The problem for the great Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot was that there were far too many suspects. The strange death of the European Union may prove to be a rather similar case. So used are we to hearing the process of European integration likened to an unstoppable train that we discount the idea it could ever stop in its tracks. Yet the reality is that Europe has been quietly disintegrating for some time. Outwardly, it’s true, Europe’s leaders still appear to be inching toward their long-cherished goal of “ever closer union.” Last month they agreed to set up a new European Stability Mechanism to deal with future financial crises.
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Concern in govt over PFI’s growing outfits, spread - Shishir Gupta, Indian Express
While the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI) may not make serious impact in the Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puduchery Assembly elections this month, the exponential rise of the minority-dominated outfit backed by the radical Popular Front of India (PFI), from Kerala to Uttar Pradesh, is making waves in the internal security establishment. The SDPI intends to fight on 98 seats in Kerala and seven seats in Tamil Nadu. The activities of PFI and its carefully selected affiliates have been a subject of intense review at the highest levels of the government given the fact that its operational nucleus comprises former SIMI leaders and activists.
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'The anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all' - George Monbiot, Guardian UK
Over the last fortnight I've made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science , unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice. I began to see the extent of the problem after a debate last week with Helen Caldicott . Dr Caldicott is the world's foremost anti-nuclear campaigner. She has received 21 honorary degrees and scores of awards, and was nominated for a Nobel peace prize. Like other greens, I was in awe of her. In the debate she made some striking statements about the dangers of radiation. So I did what anyone faced with questionable scientific claims should do: I asked for the sources. Caldicott's response has profoundly shaken me.
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I will fight till death: Anna Hazare - Jiby Kattakayam, The Hindu
Even as some of his demands have been addressed and deliberations on others are continuing, social activist Anna Hazare on Thursday said he would “fight till his death.” Addressing the media and a huge crowd of supporters who gathered at Jantar Mantar here on the third day of his fast, Mr. Hazare said politicians did not want a Lokpal Bill because it would put a stop to their “loot” of the exchequer. “Now scams like 2G spectrum, Commonwealth Games and Adarsh housing are being exposed but the corrupt are not going to jail. We want a Lokpal Bill to jail the corrupt and get them hanged,” the activist said, much to the surprise of his supporters.
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India wins again - Times of India
After a last-minute twist almost derailed a peace deal between Anna Hazare and the government, the Gandhian on Friday announced that he would call off his fast at 10am on Saturday with official negotiators accepting all his conditions. Civil society protesters laying siege to Jantar Mantar, where Hazare has been on fast for the last four days, won a decisive battle. After holding out over a formal notification of a joint committee of activists and ministers, the Centre agreed to issue a government order that was accepted by activists. Besides a joint panel with a 50:50 ministerial-activist composition, the Centre accepted Hazare's offer of the committee being co-chaired. This is the only compromise the activists agreed to after the Centre said it would concede the chair to Hazare's group but no minister would be on it. Hazare said the co-chair formula was a middle path as he was keen that ministers be on the panel.
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Five years of stability - Kumkum Chadha, Hindustan Times
During the last session of Parliament, BJP's LK Advani, informally, made two points. He said the national scenario is worrying and there are diverse views on mid-term polls. "What political parties want is different from what individual MPs want," he had said. This means that political parties could consider pushing towards a mid-term poll, except that MPs are averse to it. There is a bit of logic in both arguments. For political parties, the timing could not be better given that the Congress-led government is sufficiently tainted with scams. The Bihar elections have shown that Rahul Gandhi's sheen is a mirage and the going could get tough for the Congress. The much-touted Cabinet reshuffle willy-nilly exposed fissures within the Congress. Worse still, the rap from the apex court on several issues put the government in the dock.
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Rana, Headley implicate Pak, ISI in Mumbai attack during ISI chief's visit to US - Chidanand Rajghatta, Times of India
David Headley aka Daood Gilani and Tahawwur Hussain Rana, the two Pakistani expat foot soldiers who allegedly planned and conducted the Mumbai recce before the 26/11 terrorist carnage have implicated the Pakistani government and its intelligence agency ISI in the ghastly attack. In court documents that have surfaced ahead of his upcoming trial in Chicago, Rana says his acts of providing material support to terrorists in the Mumbai attacks as alleged by US prosecutors ''were done at the behest of the Pakistani government and the ISI, not the Lashkar terrorist organization.'' The documents also cite Rana invoking his friend David Headley's Grand Jury testimony in which the latter too implicates ISI.
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Most wanted at large - Joginder Singh, Pioneer
Given India’s archaic laws and ageing leadership, it is unlikely that even if we can extradite terrorists from Pakistan, we will be able to convict them in a court of law. There is no point bringing the wanted fugitives back from Pakistan if we cannot have expedited trials for them. Take the Batla House incident for example: The ‘encounter’ happened in 2008 but it was not until this year that we were able to frame charges. Similarly, it took 13 years for the trial of the1993 Mumbai blasts case to be completed.
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Pawar may be controlling DB Realty, says Radia - Abhinav Garg, Times of India
Corporate lobbyist Niira Radia has told the CBI that Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar may be controlling the controversial DB Realty and may have pursued the issue of spectrum and licence for Swan Telecom with former telecom minister A Raja. In a statement to CBI, which has been filed as part of the chargesheet in the 2G scam, Radia says on being asked by a journalist how she knew about Pawar lobbying with Raja to get approvals for Swan, "That as per the general perception in Mumbai as well as outside DB Realties (sic) directly or indirectly (is) controlled by Sharad Pawar and his family members."
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India secondary, LeT has declared 'jehad' on America: US commander - Indian Express
Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) has declared 'jehad' on America and is expanding its reach to Europe and other continents, a top US military commander has said, warning that it was no longer solely focussed on India or South Asia. LeT, considered the best-funded terror outfit in the region, had carried out the audacious 2008 Mumbai terror attacks which killed 166 people, including Americans and other foreigners.
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1984 riots: Witness pressurised to save Sajjan Kumar - Headlines Today
For more than 26 years, the victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots have been fighting a long and lonely battle for justice. Justice is not only being delayed but virtually denied by powerful Congress leaders - ironically even by those whose job is to protect the interests of the minorities. Former member of Parliament Sajjan Kumar has been accused of instigating mobs to kill innocent Sikhs in 1984 in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination. However, Harinder Baweja, Editor, investigations, has exposed the ugly, uncomfortable truth about him. A special investigation by Headlines Today has found that Nirpreet Kaur, a key witness against Sajjan Kumar, was being pressurised by HS Hanspal, a senior member of the Minorities Commission.
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Naxals are reaching out to Lashkar-e-Toiba - Anupam Dasgupta, The Week
The gravest internal security threat” was how Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described Naxalism, after Maoists massacred 75 CRPF troops in Chhattisgarh on April 6 last year. But there’s something more menacing—the Maoists are moving closer to a terror group that is looking to bleed India: the Lashkar-e-Toiba. Intelligence inputs THE WEEK accessed point to it. A Naxal meeting in Tulsi Dongri in Chhattisgarh in May 2010 had two LeT invitees as “observers".
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China's crackdown - The Economist
Like so much else under Heaven, repression in China has often seemed to go in cycles. Every now and then it has suited the country’s leaders to relax their steely grip on the country and allow a modicum of political liberty. Freer criticism in the media has helped give the party a veneer of credibility. Lip-service to the law and due process has won plaudits overseas and boosted the economy at home. So a thaw would set in for a while, a “Beijing spring”. A freeze would always follow. But, until lately, in each new cycle the springs were seeming warmer and the freezes not quite so harsh. When the country was starting to liberalise, Westerners justified doing business with China on just such grounds. More economic openness would surely lead to more openness of other kinds.
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On secular fatwas - Madhu Purnima Kishwar, Times of India
The disdain with which leading lights of the anti-corruption movement - Mallika Sarabhai, Medha Patkar, Kavita Srivastava et al - are publicly threatening to dislodge Anna Hazare from the leadership role because he praised Narendra Modi's rural development work in Gujarat indicates that the poor man was only being used as a convenient symbol that can be discarded as arbitrarily as he was chosen to lead the 'movement'. Human rights activists can retain their credibility only as long as they remain steadfastly non-partisan. To the person killed, it matters little whether the murderous mob was shouting 'Lal Salaam', 'Har Har Mahadev' or 'National Unity' as did the mobs that massacred over 10,000 Sikhs in north India following Indira Gandhi's assassination.
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Cancer of corruption - Dhiraj Nayyar, Padmaparna Ghosh and Shafi Rahman, India Today
The real battle for the future began the moment Anna Hazare sipped lemon water at Delhi's Jantar Mantar to break his fast on April 9. The four-day fast started on a low-key note, but exploded into a nationwide exhibition of anger, as a diminutive, unknown Gandhian from Maharashtra turned into a giant icon, a heroic symbol of the hidden despair that had been swelling in the consciousness of an outraged nation. Spontaneous protests broke out in 450 cities and towns across India. The indifferent UPA government, seized by a rising panic, caved in within 98 hours, and accepted the demand for the creation of an independent Lokpal who would become India's guardian against corruption. It did not realize that this was only the start of a long battle for change.
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A crisis of credibility - Prakash Singh, Times of India
The strength of a country is determined by the credibility of its institutions and not so much by the numerical strength of its armed forces. The founding fathers of the Indian Constitution took great care to establish certain institutions which would work as the bulwark of democracy and ensure justice, liberty, equality and fraternity to citizens. These institutions are unfortunately under attack by a predatory executive. The institutions whose credibility has suffered in recent years include the Central Vigilance Commission, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), the Election Commission (EC), the National Security Council (NSC) and even the office of the president of India.
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Great Indian Lok Pal trick - A Surya Prakash, Pioneer
The promise of bringing in an effective law to curb corruption in the top echelons of the state should undoubtedly go down as the biggest hoax played by the political class on the people of India after independence. Every Government, from the days of Jawaharlal Nehru to Mr Manmohan Singh, promised to establish an institution to bring to book corrupt Ministers and MPs and reneged on it. But, going by the statements of Mr Manmohan Singh and Ms Sonia Gandhi after the recent settlement with Anna Hazare, there can be no doubt that the Congress and the Prime Minister have taken deception to a new level altogether.
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The world of holy warcraft - Jarret Brachman and Alix Levine, Foreign Policy
In December 2004, a frequent online commenter who had reached "administrator" level on his favorite chat site admitted that he was getting fed up with his online life. In his 19,938th comment on the forum, he wrote that his wife had grown impatient with how much time he spent online, he was sick of the verbal assaults from other posters, and despite being just a few posts away from the 20,000 mark, he was throwing in the towel.
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Foreign policy on its knees - Brahma Chellaney, Live Mint
The “incredible India” of the tourism ad campaign is increasingly showing itself in reality as a “credulous India”—one that refuses to learn from past mistakes or realize the costs of a meandering, personality-driven approach to policymaking. India’s foreign policy kowtows to two of its neighbours on the same day last week highlight this. It has become tradition for any Indian prime minister visiting China to make an important concession to his hosts. Though Manmohan Singh travelled to Sanya ostensibly for the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) meeting held last Wednesday, he still delivered a gift-wrapped, two-in-one concession to Chinese President Hu Jintao—a double Indian climbdown on bilateral defence exchanges.
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IAF losing edge over PAF - Shiv Aroor & Durga Nandini, India Today
The Pakistan Air Force is stronger than ever. Since the last Indo-Pak air war of 1971, the Pakistan Air Force has with steely determination built up numbers, lethal capabilities and a combat force now counted as one of the most disciplined and well-trained air forces in the world. Headlines Today has a disturbing proof that all this has made India worried. A recent presentation by the defence intelligence establishment paints a morbid picture of how the numbers and capability advantage that the Indian Air Force has always found comfort in is rapidly slipping away.
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Robin Hood: a tax whose time has come - Ha-Joon Chang and Duncan Green, Guardian
In 1816, the British parliament repealed the temporary income tax that William Pitt the Younger had introduced in 1789 to finance the Napoleonic war. The MPs hated the tax so much that they even agreed that all documents connected with it should be collected, cut into pieces and pulped. When the income tax was reintroduced in Britain in 1842 by Robert Peel, everyone considered it a temporary measure to replenish the depleted exchequer. But despite generations of politicians after Peel promising to abolish it, the tax never went away.
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What will be Sonia’s response now? - S Gurumurthy, Express Buzz
Indeed it is an exciting, explosive, website. It lists the scams of India since Independence — Bofors, 2G, CWG included — with colour photographs of alleged scamsters. It exposes the “hidden truth” about the “Congress party” and “the dynasty”. Most important for Indian discourse, it is unquestionably ‘secular’! Next, it is not even remotely BJP’s work, nor Lohiites’, or Subramanian Swamy’s, or the work of anyone who the media can dismiss as reckless, or of someone inimical to Sonia Gandhi or the UPA. On the contrary it belongs to those who Sonia Gandhi herself seems to respect a lot. Whose site is this then? Wait till the climax. Here is a telling catalogue of its explosive contents.
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The big story - T N Ninan, Business Standard
Amidst the anguish about corruption – and, one might add, the dirty tricks unleashed against those campaigning on the issue – people have tended to forget that the big story in India, the truly exciting story, remains rapid economic growth. That was underlined by the Planning Commission formally adopting on Thursday a 9-9.5 per cent annual growth target for the five years beginning next April — building on the average of 7.8 per cent in the preceding 10 years. The size of the middle class has exploded, and the poverty numbers have declined.
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China’s train wreck - Charles Lane, Washington Post
For the past eight years, Liu Zhijun was one of the most influential people in China. As minister of railways, Liu ran China’s $300 billion high-speed rail project. U.S., European and Japanese contractors jostled for a piece of the business while foreign journalists gushed over China’s latest high-tech marvel. Today, Liu Zhijun is ruined, and his high-speed rail project is in trouble. On Feb. 25, he was fired for “severe violations of discipline” — code for embezzling tens of millions of dollars. Seems his ministry has run up $271 billion in debt — roughly five times the level that bankrupted General Motors. But ticket sales can’t cover debt service that will total $27.7 billion in 2011 alone. Safety concerns also are cropping up.
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US lists Pakistan's ISI as terrorist group - Jason Burke, Guardian UK
US authorities describe the main Pakistani intelligence service as a terrorist organisation in secret files obtained by the Guardian. Recommendations to interrogators at Guantánamo Bay rank the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) alongside al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon as threats. Being linked to any of these groups is an indication of terrorist or insurgent activity, the documents say.
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Hazards of taking on Khaps from the judicial pulpit - Rajeev Dhavan, India Today
Are Khap panchayats illegal? Or, are they simply not allowed to do illegal things? Justice Katju's judgment in the Tamil Nadu Arumugam Servai case has won great media notoriety by declaring Khap panchayats 'barbaric' and 'shameful'. Is this really the case? In fact, the case in question had nothing to do with Khaps and arose out of a member of 'Servai' backward caste abusing and beating up two 'Palan' scheduled caste members at a temple festival and saying they were "Pallapayal and eating deadly cow beef".
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'India shouldn't have endorsed Lanka's brutal war': Gordon Weiss - Ullekh NP, ET
The ruling classes in Sri Lanka are unhappy that a UN panel report has sought a probe into alleged war crimes committed against Tamils in 2009. An angry President Mahinda Rajapakse has called for mass "May Day protests" against such calls for investigations. Gordon Weiss was the UN spokesman in Sri Lanka in those turbulent times leading to the capture and assassination of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) chief V Prabhakaran. He left the UN soon, declining the offer of a new assignment in favour of writing about innocent civilians caught in the crossfire between the ruthless Lankan forces and the Tigers. He returned home, to Australia, early last year and started writing the book, The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka & the Last Days of the Tigers, months before the United Nations set up a team to review the "military conquest" of the Tigers. He says the panel's report vindicates his earlier statements about the war crimes of 2009.
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Me, my family, my son-in-law: Pilots want a freebie parivar - Smita Aggarwal, IE
Unlike private airlines’ employees, who have restricted passages and specific definition of family to include only immediate members such as self, spouse, dependent children and parents, Air India’s definition is far more generous. According to Air India, an employee’s family, entitled to travel free with him/her, includes: spouse, children, step-children, parents, brothers, sisters, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law and even grandchildren up to 12 years. Even those who have retired are entitled to passages. In fact, freebies like passages are at the heart of the trouble fomenting at the airline, and one of the main reasons why the union decided to declare a strike.
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Purulia Exposé: India's best kept secret - Times Now
In the wee hours of December 18 1995 a mysterious weapon consignment was dropped from the sky over Joupur Jhalda area under Purulia district of West Bengal. The consignment was discovered the next morning. Until now nobody knew what really happened. Today Kim Davy the seventh man and the leader of the operation reveals everything to Times Now.
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Pakistan asks Afghanistan to dump US - Matthew Rosenberg, WSJ
Pakistan is lobbying Afghanistan's president against building a long-term strategic partnership with the US, urging him instead to look to Pakistan—and its Chinese ally—for help in striking a peace deal with the Taliban and rebuilding the economy, Afghan officials say. The pitch was made at an April 16 meeting in Kabul by Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, who bluntly told Afghan President Hamid Karzai that the Americans had failed them both, according to Afghans familiar with the meeting. Mr. Karzai should forget about allowing a long-term US military presence in his country, Mr. Gilani said, according to the Afghans.
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Osama's picture after being killed? - Larry Brown, Larry Brown Sports
Osama bin Laden was killed on Sunday May 1st. Knowing bin Laden’s reputation for being elusive, many people said they wouldn’t believe the news until they saw a picture of him dead. Well here is a censored version of the rumored picture of Osama bin Laden after he was killed. Keep in mind this is a rumored version, though FOX News says pictures do exist.
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Congress’ Pyrrhic victory scars India - Express Buzz
Thursday would go as one of the darkest days in India’s parliamentary history. The garrulous obstructionism displayed by the Congress and its allies in blocking the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report on the 2G spectrum scam is a measure of their acute desperation. The fact that PAC chairman M M Joshi was forced to walk out because he was not allowed to speak shows how ugly things turned. Clear signs of this were there even before the meeting began.
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Osama conspiracy theories - Ajai Shukla, Business Standard
After years of not knowing whether Osama bin Laden was alive or dead, he was briefly resurrected through the announcement of his killing in a US special forces operation near Abbottabad, Pakistan. For me, bin Laden’s death feels strangely personal. I moved into his house in Kabul just a couple of days after he vacated it in November 2001. Soon afterwards, at the cave complex of Tora Bora near Jalalabad, I was amongst the journalists who watched from about a kilometre away as US Air Force B-52 bombers pulverised the cave mouths. And then, one morning, we learned that bin Laden and his inner coterie had escaped the previous evening, a small group trekking across the Safed Koh mountain range into the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan.
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India puts tight leash on internet free speech - Vikas Bajaj, New York Times
Free speech advocates and Internet users are protesting new Indian regulations restricting Web content that, among other things, can be considered “disparaging,” “harassing,” “blasphemous” or “hateful.” The new rules, quietly issued by the country’s Department of Information Technology earlier this month and only now attracting attention, allow officials and private citizens to demand that Internet sites and service providers remove content they consider objectionable on the basis of a long list of criteria.
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Israel helped India with arms during the 1962 & 1971 wars - Kallol Bhattacherjee, Week
Israel was born on May 14, 1948. In 1950, India recognised Israel. But ties remained cold till 1992, when both sides normalised relations. The diplomatic chill did not hinder defence cooperation between the two sides, especially in times of international conflict in South Asia. The papers on India-Israel ties between 1948 to 1979, released by the Israeli government, prove this. These diplomatic cables, released by the Israel State Archives, originated at the Israeli consulate that was opened in Bombay on March 1, 1951.
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Osama bin Laden is killed by US forces in Pakistan - Philip Rucker, Washington Post
Osama bin Laden, the longtime al-Qaeda leader and chief architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, was killed Sunday by U.S. forces, President Obama announced late Sunday night. Acting on an intelligence lead that first surfaced last August, Obama said he authorized an operation to kill bin Laden, who was hiding in a compound deep inside Pakistan. The president, in a rare Sunday night address to the nation, said U.S. forces killed bin Laden during a firefight and captured his body.
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After Bin Laden's death: Whither US-Pak relations? - Jane Perlez, New York Times
With Bin Laden’s death, perhaps the central reason for an alliance forged on the ashes of 9/11 has been removed, at a moment when relations between the countries are already at one of their lowest points as their strategic interests diverge over the shape of a post-war Afghanistan. For nearly a decade, the United States has paid Pakistan more than $1 billion a year for counterterrorism operations whose chief aim was the killing or capture of Bin Laden, who slipped across the border from Afghanistan after the American invasion. The circumstance of Bin Laden’s death may not only jeopardize that aid, but will also no doubt deepen suspicions that Pakistan has played a double game, and perhaps even knowingly harbored the Qaeda leader.
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1,500 illegal appointments in Jammu and Kashmir civic bodies - Muzamil Jaleel, IE
At a time when the J&K government is emphasising the need to empower grass roots governance, a large-scale illegal appointment racket has been exposed in its flagship Urban Local Bodies Department that overlooks the functioning of 83 muncipal bodies across the state. The department has made more than 1,500 illegal appointments, almost doubling the number of employees. The result: funds raised from local tax collection, devolution funds from the state’s revenue and developmental grants are now exclusively utilised to pay salaries.
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'Declare Pakistan a terrorist state' - Salman Rushdie, The Daily Beast
Osama bin Laden died on Walpurgisnacht, the night of black sabbaths and bonfires. Not an inappropriate night for the Chief Witch to fall off his broomstick and perish in a fierce firefight. One of the most common status updates on Facebook after the news broke was “Ding, Dong, the witch is dead,” and that spirit of Munchkin celebration was apparent in the faces of the crowds chanting “U-S-A!” last night outside the White House and at ground zero and elsewhere. Almost a decade after the horror of 9/11, the long manhunt had found its quarry, and Americans will be feeling less helpless this morning, and pleased at the message that his death sends: “Attack us and we will hunt you down, and you will not escape.”
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Pakistan's cooperation with US in killing Osama Bin Laden: The real story - KP Nayar, Telegraph Calcutta
There has been a coup d’etat in Pakistan. A quiet one. But it is a coup that may change the course of history not only in South Asia but in the entire Islamic ummah or community. By giving up Osama bin Laden, the Pakistan Army’s wildest trump card in the cat-and-mouse game between Islamabad and Washington that reached a critical point when CIA contractor Raymond Davis was arrested, factions in the Pakistani establishment which seek a continued alliance with the US have displaced those who want Pakistan to be part of a global Islamic resurgence.
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How Goldman Sachs created the food crisis - Frederick Kaufman, Foreign Policy
It took the brilliant minds of Goldman Sachs to realize the simple truth that nothing is more valuable than our daily bread. And where there's value, there's money to be made. In 1991, Goldman bankers, led by their prescient president Gary Cohn, came up with a new kind of investment product, a derivative that tracked 24 raw materials, from precious metals and energy to coffee, cocoa, cattle, corn, hogs, soy, and wheat. They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known henceforth as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index.
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Good thinking, Bihar! - Business world
Bihar is known to have achieved high SDP (state domestic product)-growth in the past decade; this improvement has been attributed to the tenure of its chief minister, Nitish Kumar, for lack of better evidence. But now, evidence has become available, thanks to the Bihar government, which has published what is perhaps the most comprehensive and systematic economic survey of any state.
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Gadkari’s conclave could give direction to BJP - Prabhu Chawla, Express buzz
The mostly airborne jetset leadership of the BJP in Delhi finally decided to land on planet Earth last week. After ignoring the real leaders and achievers of the nationalist movement for nearly two years, the party high command chose to hold a dialogue with them about the fate and future of the party, which has neither identity nor ideology. For the past seven years, its leaders have been speaking in many voices on almost every national issue. Finally, wisdom seems to have dawned on its youngest party president in history, Nitin Gadkari. Early last week, when he summoned all BJP chief ministers including a deputy chief minister, the agenda was crystal clear.
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Pakistan's web of deceit - Mosharraf Zaidi, Foreign Policy
This duplicity helped keep the West sufficiently interested in the myth of "engaging the elite" -- because of course engaging the people would mean courting savagery. It also helped keep the Pakistani people sufficiently hostile toward any notion of understanding or appreciating the West's genuine and legitimate concerns and interests in Pakistan. But with time, this delicate waltz has grown harder and harder to sustain. The Pakistani military, for all its swagger, has either forgotten all the steps, or never knew them to begin with.
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A $300 idea that is priceless - The Economist
Friedrich Engles said in “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, in 1844, that the onward march of Manchester’s slums meant that the city’s Angel Meadow district might better be described as “Hell upon Earth”. Today, similar earthly infernos can be found all over the emerging world: from Brazil’s favelas to Africa’s shanties. In 2010 the United Nations calculated that there were about 827m people living in slums—almost as many people as were living on the planet in Engels’s time—and predicted that the number might double by 2030.
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Voters’ Pique & Emotion Catapult Jagan to a Landslide Victory In Kadapa By-Poll - Bureau, LensOnNews
According to an extensive Post-poll survey conducted by LensOnNews.com, Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy who floated his regional outfit Y.S.R. Congress is all set to sweep the Kadapa Lok Sabha by election by a record margin surpassing all expectations. The LensOnNews poll projects that Y.S.Jagan will secure a lion’s share 74% of the votes polled in the by-elections. The Congress party is expected to experience a humiliating defeat and the party’s candidate D.L. Raveendra Reddy may even lose security deposit.
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Why can’t we simply follow the example of the Americans? - Vir Sanghvi
In India, life is cheap. As far as our politicians are concerned, our citizens are no more than cattle who turn out to vote every five years. In America, the state values the lives of its citizens. It protects them, nurtures them and, if necessary, avenges them. That’s why America is the world’s greatest power. And that’s why, despite all the growth of the last two decades, India is still floundering on the road to great-power status. The world only respects a country when it respects the lives of its own citizens.
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CEO factories - Vivek Sinha & Sandeep Singh, Hindustan Times
Last month, when Suresh Vaswani took over as chairman of Dell India, months after leaving IT major Wipro as its joint CEO, he joined a long list of Wipro alumni who stepped out of the company's green Sarjapur campus in Bangalore to take up leadership positions elsewhere. Industry experts say that Wipro is not alone in being a nursery for CEOs. A handful of companies including PepsiCo, Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL), Citibank and ICICI Bank are famous for throwing up executives who go on to don big hats at other companies.
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‘Cong is a ma-bete ki party. No one has courage to speak against Sonia’: Gadkari - IE
The time has come for the young generation to understand Hindutva. Swami Vivekananda described Hindutva--it is very different from the misconceptions in people's minds. Hindutva is good governance, Hindutva is tolerance and it is representative of our country and our culture. We are also trying to give the correct meaning of Hindutva. I believe from the core of my heart, there is a problem of image versus reality and we need people to understand and rectify wrong impressions.
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Manmohan’s is the most corrupt government ever - K. Balakrishnan, LensOnNews
A nationwide opinion poll by LensOnNews reveals that a majority (58 per cent) of people in urban India consider the present Manmohan Singh led UPA government at the Centre as the “most corrupt government ever.” Asked to name one state government that is the least corrupt in the country, as many as 40 per cent of the respondents to the poll named Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, evidently for its record of performance in providing responsive and corruption-free government in the state. Nitish Kumar’s Bihar was a distant second with 17 per cent. While 55 per cent of respondents expect the movement initiated by Anna Hazare to yield positive results, a majority do not support Baba Ramdev’s reported plans to launch a political party.
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Obama-Osama mistake - S Rajagopalan, The Pioneer
It may well have been President Barack Obama who ordered the elite the US Navy Seals to go and take out Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, but for several media outlets, this dramatic development out of the blue led to a host of unfortunate gaffes. Sample some of these headlines: “Obama dead”, “Obama shot and killed”, “President Obama is in fact dead”, “Obama bin Laden dead” and what have you. For many broadcast journalists it was the proverbial slip of the tongue, having to frequently deal with the names of Obama and Osama in the same breath. A network as reputed as BBC had a ticker saying “Obama dead” when the news was just breaking.
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The art of graft - Arvind Panagariya, Times of India
Corruption in India has attracted much commentary. Given the large number of members in Parliament and state legislative assemblies facing criminal charges, Bimal Jalan has proposed that candidates with pending criminal cases be subject to fast-tracking of such cases once they are elected. Jagdish Bhagwati has suggested opening up legal sources of campaign finance to curb the current reliance on illegal sources.
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A declaration of cyber-war - Michael Joseph Gross, Vanity Fair
Last summer, the world’s top software-security experts were panicked by the discovery of a drone-like computer virus, radically different from and far more sophisticated than any they’d seen. The race was on to figure out its payload, its purpose, and who was behind it. As the world now knows, the Stuxnet worm appears to have attacked Iran’s nuclear program. And, as Michael Joseph Gross reports, while its source remains something of a mystery, Stuxnet is the new face of 21st-century warfare: invisible, anonymous, and devastating.
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Land Grab. And how to make millions - Ashish Khetan, Tehelka
The politician-builder nexus in Maharashtra has plundered away prime land. Can Prithviraj Chavan break the vice-like grip the realtors have over the state? A few days after Prithviraj Chavan was inaugurated as Maharashtra chief minister last November, an over-ambitious Congress MP from Mumbai rang up the chief minister’s office and sought an appointment. A few hours later, the MP, who everybody knew was constructing a slum rehabilitation project in Andheri besides many small real estate projects that he had set up in the name of his brother, received a call from the CM’s office confirming the appointment. But there was a caveat. “Sahab has asked me to ensure that you are coming alone. So please don’t bring anybody along,” said the new CM’s personal secretary. The MP got the message. Builders and real estate developers were persona non grata with the new CM.
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Why Narendra Modi’s Gujarat is the least corrupt, best rated government - GVL Narasimha Rao, LensOnNews
Nationwide there is a buzz that Narendra Modi’s Gujarat has achieved a lot of progress and has made rapid strides in development and industrial progress largely on account of Modi’s inspiring leadership, unquestioned integrity and good governance. No wonder, 40 percent of the people interviewed in urban India in the LensOnNews poll have voted for Modi’s Gujarat as the state with least corruption and best record in governance. Don’t be mistaken into believing that Modi’s popularity is an urban, metropolitan phenomenon, or that it is confined to Gujarat.
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The People vs Goldman Sachs - Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it. |
Why the Kadapa bypoll is critical for the Congress - TVR Shenoy, Rediffnews
Will the 'Ceiling Fan' blow away the hidden 'Hand'? That is what Congressmen in Andhra Pradesh fear -- and what Jaganmohan Reddy hopes! Jaganmohan Reddy and his mother, Vijayalaxmi, were both Congress members until they left to found the YSR Congress. That, of course, meant that both the Kadapa Lok Sabha seat held by Reddy and the Pulivendula assembly seat held by his mother had to be vacated. The Election Commission decided that the by-elections would be held on May 8. The YSR Congress came into existence on March 12, 2011, much too late to go through the process of getting its own symbol. So some bright soul had a brainwave: putting up multiple candidates with the same name, to confuse voters used to symbols.
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India's Tahrir Square - West Bengal - Surjit S Bhalla, Financial Express
Most likely, the real revolution in India will be happening as you read this forecast. After 34 years in undiluted power, the last of the Communists are going to resign themselves to their worldwide fate of extinction. They should get less than 60 seats in an assembly of 294 seats. That is elimination. Perhaps I exaggerate—at last count there was a Communist party in Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela.
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Pakistan’s nuclear surge - Andrew Bast, Newsweek
Even in the best of times, Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program warrants alarm. But these are perilous days. At a moment of unprecedented misgiving between Washington and Islamabad, new evidence suggests that Pakistan’s nuclear program is barreling ahead at a furious clip. According to new commercial-satellite imagery obtained exclusively by NEWSWEEK, Pakistan is aggressively accelerating construction at the Khushab nuclear site, about 140 miles south of Islamabad. The images, analysts say, prove Pakistan will soon have a fourth operational reactor, greatly expanding plutonium production for its nuclear-weapons program.
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Hillary Clinton: Chinese system is doomed, leaders on a 'fool's errand' - Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic
In my latest Atlantic cover story, which is out now, I interview Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton about America's response to the Arab Spring. When we met last month, in her State Department office, she was, as usual, fluent, comprehensive, and in total control of the details. She was also insistent that the Administration's approach to the Middle East betrayed no inconsistencies or hypocrisies (there is much on this subject below, in a transcript of the interview). We didn't spend a great deal of time on the Middle East peace process (though my belief, expressed repeatedly, is that she is the best-qualified person in America to bring the Israelis and Arabs to a negotiated settlement); instead, we discussed the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood.
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Debunking six myths about Narendra Modi - Chetan Bhagat, Times of India
A few weeks ago, I wrote on Gujarat and Narendra Modi. It attracted more comments than any of my columns in two years. In the thousand-odd comments , there was a high degree of misconception, exaggeration and misunderstanding. I have no reason to keep writing on Modi. But considering he is such a touchy issue in Indian politics, i'd like to bust the six Modi myths floating around. The anti-Modi myth number one is that he is akin to Hitler. Comparing the CM to possibly one of the most evil leaders on earth makes sensational copy, but is not factually correct. Yes, the post-Godhra riots targeted a particular religion . However, the scale, its organized and unprovoked nature, the extent and time period of the holocaust were at an entirely different level. Most importantly, Hitler was dictator of Germany at that point. He had dissolved democracy and controlled the army.
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SC judgement challenge to democracy - Arun Jaitely, Pioneer
Governor of Karnataka Hansraj Bhardwaj has sent a letter to the Union Government recommending action under Article 356 of the Constitution. This has been widely reported in the media. The Government headed by BS Yeddyurappa has won most of the by-elections in the last few years. It has succeeded in the Municipal elections and panchayat elections. The popularity of the Government is not in doubt. The Government has demonstrated support of over 121 MLAs in a House whose present strength is 223. The Council of Ministers has requested the Governor to call a session of the Assembly on May 16. The Governor has declined to call the session and instead sent a recommendation to the Centre.
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Polls 2011: This time Jaya can send DMK into oblivion, permanently - Aditya Sinha, DNA
As Jaya begins her third term in office, this column will nonetheless engage in a bit of punditry. She can completely finish the DMK, for though it is already imploding from its family feuds it still has the heft and cash of Sun TV’s Kalanithi Maran. All that is needed for her electoral ally Vijaykanth, the B-centre Kollywood matinee idol (who has no neck), to become the Leader of Opposition instead of joining government (his party got more seats than the DMK, so he can take on this role). In India, politics revolves around two poles; most polls are anti-voting exercises.
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Demise of a corporate form - Haseeb A Drabu, Mint
How do top Indian companies introduce their organizations? The Aditya Birla Group, for instance, introduces itself as a Fortune 500, $30 billion corporation that is anchored by 130,600 employees belonging to 40 different nationalities. The Tata group sees itself as a $67 billion enterprise comprising over 90 operating companies in more than 80 countries across six continents, with nearly 60% of its revenues coming from business outside India.
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China’s dangerous growth bet - Nouriel Roubini, Live Mint
I recently took two trips to China just as the government launched its 12th Five-year Plan to rebalance the country’s long-term growth model. My visits deepened my view that there is a potentially destabilizing contradiction between China’s short- and medium-term economic performance. China’s economy is overheating now, but, over time, its current overinvestment will prove deflationary both domestically and globally. Once increasing fixed investment becomes impossible—most likely after 2013—China is poised for a sharp slowdown.
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Non-performing assets - K R Balasubramanyam, Business Today
In January, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh reshuffled the portfolios of several of his Cabinet ministers. These included portfolios of some key economic ministers who had been facing criticism for their inaction and sloth. If Singh had thought the reshuffle would enthuse his two-year old United Progressive Alliance, or UPA, government, he could not have been more off-the-mark. One hundred days after the reshuffle, the seven Cabinet ministers who got the economic ministries - barring S. Jaipal Reddy, Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas - have shown little of either initiative or results.
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Wise men’s folly - Swapan Dasgupta, Asian Age
For a long time, until voter identity cards became an obligatory feature of elections, horror stories of electoral malpractice were routinely heard in West Bengal. There were instances of entire mohallas being excluded from electoral rolls; there were tales of non-Left parties being prevented from stationing polling agents; and, finally, there was an epidemic of organised impersonation. The phenomenon of proxy voting was particularly interesting. In some cases, the Comrades identified potential “class enemies” and ensured that someone voted for them before they arrived to vote.
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Government fights midlife crisis, seven-year itch - Varghese K George, Hindustan Times
The romance between voters and the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) appears strained — by an unusual coalition of a midlife crisis and a seven-year itch. It’s only the second anniversary of the UPA-2 government — nearly halfway into the life of its term — but the coalition has been in power since 2004, making it a continuous run of seven years. Manmohan Singh is the longest serving prime minister after Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Even under normal circumstances, disillusion would have set in and alternatives would have looked more attractive. A torrent of scams and some slipshod policy moves could have made it far worse. An HT-C Fore survey across 14 cities , polling 10,126 people, reveals that there are still a few silver linings in the clouds for Singh and Team.
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Marketing brand Rahul - Jatin Gandhi, Open
Not so long ago, he was a mascot of the youth. Now he wants to be seen as the voice of the aam aadmi. Great branding it may be, but success is harder fought. Even before he entered active electoral politics, Rahul Gandhi was a man with superstar status in India. Little was known about him, except that he belonged to the first family of Indian politics and was expected to succeed three prime ministers before him from the Nehru-Gandhi clan. And since two of them, his father and grandmother, were victims of political assassinations, he grew up almost in secrecy with rings of security around him, and went overseas for higher education.
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Who speaks for the world? - Dennis Sewell, Spectator UK
In the field of public diplomacy, the tiny Gulf state of Qatar has become a mouse that roars. According to Hillary Clinton, the Emir of Qatar’s television network, Al Jazeera, is knocking spots off the broadcasters of three superpowers in a global struggle for influence being played out across the airwaves. ‘We are in an information war and we are losing,’ Clinton warned the Senate foreign relations committee in March. Making only the briefest mention of the enormous expansion of international broadcasting funded by the Russian and Chinese governments in recent years, the US secretary of state went on to declare that ‘Al Jazeera is winning.’
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Anniversary of a lost opportunity - Anil Padmanabhan, Mint
Four seemingly unrelated yet significant developments that played out in the run-up to the second anniversary of the United Progressive Alliance sum up the second innings of this government. One exposed the dysfunctional nature of UPA-II, the second reflected the government’s failure in tackling the single-biggest macroeconomic malaise (for some time now), the third indicated the government’s inability to sell a policy decision to its various stakeholders and constituents, and the last reiterated the taint of alleged corruption that’s become, in some ways, the leitmotif of this government.
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Communal Violence Bill fraught with danger - Arun Jaitley
A draft of a proposed legislation titled “Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2011” has been put in public domain. The draft Bill ostensibly appears to be a part of an endeavour to prevent and punish communal violence in the country. Though that may be the ostensible object of the proposed law its real object is to the contrary. It is a Bill which if it is ever enacted as a law will intrude into the domain of the State, damage a federal polity of India and create an imbalance in the inter-community relationship of India.
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Time to leash spy agencies in India - Manoj Joshi, India Today
Make no mistake, that was not chewing gum found at sixteen different locations in the Finance Minister's offices. In Mail Today here there are a lot of young people, but you are unlikely to find gum adhering to the undersides of our desks; that is strictly for the high schools and cinema halls frequented by the young. If you accept the chewing gum thesis, you are akin to P G Wodehouse's Madeline Basset who believed that every time a fairy sneezed, a baby was born and that the stars were God's daisy chain. Dour babus and corporate heads who haunt the offices and conference rooms of the Ministry are not the kind who would chew gum, and most certainly not those who would surreptitiously stick it on the underside of the desk of the Finance Minister of the country at three different places.
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Dasvidaniya... Phew! - Chandan Mitra, Outlook
The Left has been in terminal decline all over the globe for decades now. Naturally, therefore, it had become somewhat of an anachronism in India too, though the 2004-08 period marked the high-watermark of its importance in national politics. The writing was on the wall and once UPA-I survived the trust vote in 2008, the CPI(M)’s unravelling began and it’s been unstoppable thereafter. The Left’s critics didn’t have to plot a grand strategy to assist their demise: all that was needed was to demolish its edifice in Bengal, the last showpiece of Soviet-style authoritarianism.
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The MIT factor: celebrating 150 years of maverick genius - Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has led the world into the future for 150 years with scientific innovations. Its brainwaves keep the US a superpower. But what makes the university such a fertile ground for brilliant ideas?
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The mystery of a lost diary - Ian Jack, Telegraph Calcutta
I’m sure Rabindranath Tagore deserves the many celebrations of his 150th anniversary, but I can also think of one good reason to stint on the cheering. This concerns the fate of his distinguished grandfather’s diaries and correspondence. Many Tagore scholars will know the story, but the details are interesting and came as a surprise to me when, a few years ago, I tried to discover a little more about Dwarkanath Tagore’s first visit to Britain, in 1842.
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Congress clueless in AP - GS Vasu, Express Buzz
A couple of years ago if anyone spoke of launching a newspaper that would reflect the aspirations of the people of Telangana, he would have been scoffed at. It would also have sounded laughable if someone said Jagan Mohan Reddy would launch his own political outfit and take on the might of the dynasty that represents the party called the Indian National Congress. But that is a reality today. The INC, as a national political party, is rapidly losing its base in its last bastion in south India. And the blame squarely lies with what is called, in management parlance, the core group of the Congress headed by Sonia Gandhi.
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How Shiva came to Tiruvarur - Sharanya Manivannan, Sunday Guardian
Two hours by car from Tanjavur, through a meandering scenic route of paddy fields, bucolic groves and glimpses of the sun-dappled Kaveri river, is the temple town of Tiruvarur: birthplace of Carnatic music's triumvirate of doyens (the composers Kakarla Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar and Syama Sastri), and the site of the crown jewel of the South Indian Shaivite cult, the Sri Tyagarajasvami temple. Estimated to be around 1300 years old, the temple blossomed under the aegis of the major reconstructions of the Chola dynasty, and gained prominence owing to the many travelling bards who, seized by revelations, were moved to song within it.
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Don't condone the excesses of Greater Noida villagers - Dipankar Gupta, India Today
It is no secret that when men in uniform are attacked they will retaliate, and Bhatta Parsaul is no exception. Not only did the police face sticks and stones there, but gunfire too. After a provocation of this kind the police did not look to Mayawati for permission to move in. Camaraderie of the uniform has an unwritten protocol which demands instant payback and with interest. This is exactly what happened in Bhatta Parsaul. Therefore, while the police excesses of May 7 need to be investigated, the armed attack by the villagers the day before should also be enquired into. The two should proceed apace, only then can democracy and justice be delivered even- handedly.
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Take Pakistan's nukes, please - Kapil Komireddi, Foreign Policy
(T)he world must now acknowledge the fact that Pakistan's military is so deeply riven, its loyalties so thoroughly fractured, that it is incapable not only of defending Pakistan but is also dangerously unfit to be the custodian of its nuclear arsenal. It is time for Washington, Pakistan's principal paymaster in the West, to pursue the option of comprehensively denuclearizing Pakistan.
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Germany mediates secret US-Taliban talks - Susanne Koelbl & Holger Stark, Spiegel
The German government is mediating secret talks on German soil between the US government and representatives of the Taliban. Berlin is cautiously optimistic that the negotiations will deliver progress, but observers warn that the insurgents' morale remains high. It's still unknown where exactly in Germany the American and Afghan negotiators met, but when they met can be pinpointed fairly exactly: at the turn of the year and on the second weekend in May.
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The class of 2011 - Sanjay G Dhande, Indian Express
Two stories in the past few days have been very interesting. The first is the ranking published by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS Ranking) of the top 100 Asian universities. IIT Kanpur stands at 36, IIT Delhi at 37, IIT Bombay at 38, IIT Kharagpur at 48, IIT Roorkee at 56, IIT Guwahati at 82. On this list, there are several other universities from Japan, China, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.
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Dawood's Indian Empire - Shantanu Guha Ray and Kiran Tare, India Today
With many of his foot soldiers and sharp-shooters eliminated in encounters, Dawood now recruits shooters from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka and Nepal on part-time basis so that the police cannot track such killers. What is still intact is his political support. In the early '90s, it was rumoured that around 75 politicians owed their entry to Parliament to Dawood though none could confirm his clout because there was nothing on paper.... An MLA in the Maharashtra Assembly is presently under the scanner of the Intelligence Bureau for his alleged links with the don.
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The silent water wars have begun - Santha Oorjitham, Newstraitstimes
There are treaties among riparian neighbours in South and Southeast Asia, but not between China and its neighbours. For example, the lower Mekong states of Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam have a water treaty. India has water-sharing treaties with both the countries located downstream -- Bangladesh and Pakistan. There are also water treaties between India and its two small upstream neighbours, Nepal and Bhutan. But China, the dominant riparian power of Asia, refuses to enter into water-sharing arrangements with any of its neighbours.
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Hello... Who will bell this cat? - Ashish Khetan & Raman Kirpal, Tehelka
According to sources, the CBI has now trained its guns on a strikingly similar deal — though the quantum is almost four times that of the Balwa-Kalaignar transaction — between Sun TV Group, owned by the family of Union Textiles Minister Dayanidhi Maran, and Malaysian business conglomerate Maxis Group and owner of 74 percent direct equity in Aircel Group, the country’s seventh biggest telecom operator. In November 2006, then Telecom Minister Maran granted 14 (UASL) for Aircel. The licence, along with the startup 2G spectrum, was awarded at the same price at which later Raja gave away 2G licenses to Swan, Unitech and a host of other players in 2008.
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Small cities, big resources - Diksha Dutta, Financial Express
Arun Kumar, 25, wanted to settle in a big city and earn big bucks. In pursuit of his dream, he migrated to Delhi from Lucknow six months ago to join a large-sized BPO firm. “They offered me this job through a hiring centre they set up in our city a year ago. Since they did not have a functioning office in Lucknow, they were looking for English-speaking people who would be willing to migrate to their offices in Gurgaon and Mumbai,” says Kumar.
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Pakistan's spy agency and terrorism - Mansoor Ijaz, The Daily Beast
The real danger inside Pakistan is its powerful spy organization, Inter-Services Intelligence—and that an even more notorious outfit is an ISI-affiliate called S-Wing. The murder of a prominent Pakistani journalist, Syed Saleem Shahzad, who was kidnapped last Sunday in Islamabad after repeated threats by Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's premier spy agency, should be a clarion call to the international community about the increasingly strident and lawless behavior of certain elements operating freely inside Pakistan's military and intelligence organizations.
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The great iron ore rip-off - Veeresh Malik, Money Life
As a nation, we are peddling our scarce natural resources that cannot be replenished. Global players are mining iron ore for a song, destroying the natural habitat around the mines and shipping it to metal-hungry destinations and making super-profits. As usual, the powers-that-be are silent.
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The grand illusion of zero growth - Surjit S Bhalla, Indian Express
Why are our intellectuals so bankrupt? One leading NAC member, Jean Dreze, documents how the Congress’s flagship anti-poverty employment program NREGA is a “loot for work” program; loot for the administrators of the program, the middlemen and politicians. His proposed remedy? A concentrated expansion of the programme — propelled by the smug belief that since a Gandhian is involved, corruption would be eliminated.
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Hindus voting strategically? An analysis of the Hindu vote in Kerala and Assam - GVL Narasimha Rao
The commonly held notion is that caste based voting is common among Hindus but not bloc voting as a community, while Muslims tend to vote as a monolithic group. Media reports and our field reports suggest that Hindus have indeed voted as a bloc and tactically in recent state elections in Kerala and Assam. In the post-Ayodhya Rathyatra era, this is a discernible trend in voting patterns of Hindus and has significant portents for the future. What is more significant is the fact that this tactical voting and reverse mobilsation of Hindus was observed in a state like Kerala, a state associated with high levels of literacy and social development and hardly a candidate for consolidation of Hindu votes along religious lines.
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Watching the Watchdogs - Naren Karunakaran, Economic Times
The Edelman Trust Barometer of 2011, a global survey on trust in institutions, indicates that NGOs are trusted more than business in developed markets and are on par with business in emerging markets. NGOs do retain goodwill, but they cannot take for granted that people will continue to trust and hold them in high esteem as always.
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US no more the land of plenty it was - Ruchir Joshi, India Today
Time was, when arriving in America meant something glorious. You left the tawdry Indian departure lounges and flew into Europe, where the airports were phoren alright, but still somehow imbued with the faint smell of the 19th century. Leaving this, you crossed the Atlantic to reach the real first world, with its spanking, shiny chrome and glass, with its grand scale dictating everything from airport architecture to the back seats of taxis to the desks you were given to use in the colleges.
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'Maran stole a telephone exchange, looted BSNL' - S Gurumurthy, Express Buzz
Dayanidhi Maran was obviously not playing marbles with 323 telephones. He got the BSNL to lay separate and exclusive underground cable from his Boat Club home to the SUN TV office at Anna Arivalayam in Anna Salai and fraudulently linked the 323 home lines to his brother Kalanidhi’s SUN TV network. The first 23 of the 323 lines bore numbers ‘243722 11’ to ‘24372301’ and the next 300 lines bore numbers ‘24371500’ to ‘24371799’. Since the first four digits ‘2437’ were common for all 323 lines, the lines constituted a home telephone exchange. The Maran home exchange, says the CBI, was “programmed in such a way that no one other than the authorised BSNL staff were aware of the existence of such an Exchange created for his [minister’s] exclusive use”.
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Getting a fix on India's black money - Gaurav Choudhury, Hindustan Times
While Baba Ramdev was fanning nation-wide outrage in his war against corruption in austere outfits and earthy idioms, the government commissioned a joint study by three think-tanks—National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), National Institute of Financial Management (NIFM) and the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER)—to estimate Indian entities’ unaccounted wealth both home and away.
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Misappropriation galore - Ashok V Desai, The Telegraph
The World Bank was poor India’s rich aunt for many decades. Though her wealth has become less impressive as India has prospered, it is not uncommon for people in the Indian government to call her up and ask her to pick up the bill for something they want. In 2004, the chief of the Planning Commission asked the World Bank to hold a conference in Delhi on social welfare programmes. More than a dozen papers were presented over two days. They were intended for publication; but for that the World Bank needed the permission of the government of India.
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Auditing Congress Inc and BJP Ltd - Minhaz Merchant, Economic Times
Are the audited financial accounts of political parties available for public scrutiny? Technically, yes: they are submitted every year to the income tax (IT) department - but crucially not to the Election Commission (EC). Political parties are exempt from paying income tax and accessing their annual balance sheets from the IT department is a tortuous process. The accounts submitted to the EC are principally details of funds received and spent by parties during specific elections. The EC does not mandatorily require submission of annual audited profit and loss accounts.
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Global food crisis: Counting the real cost of biofuels - Alex Evans, Guardian UK
This year, 40% of America's corn crop will go into car engines rather than stomachs. Add the fact that the US is both the world's largest producer of corn and the largest exporter, and that 10 years ago only 7% of its crop went to ethanol production, and you start to see why enthusiasm for biofuels among oil importers has had such a marked impact on food prices.
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Wanted - An independent media regulator - Vanita Kohli-Khandekar, Business Standard
Sun TV’s fall from grace is just one instance of the huge gaping hole in media regulation in India. It happened partly because there are no clearly defined cross-media caps. Nor is there anything that states whether politicians or their relatives can or cannot own media vehicles and under what conditions. In the UK, for instance, political parties and religious bodies are not allowed to own media. India has dozens of examples that clearly show the need for an Ofcom (UK) or Federal Communications Commission (US) kind of autonomous media regulator that is independent of the government. The country needs a regulator that will create a policy framework for the $17 billion business of media and entertainment.
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A repression the rulers will rue - B S Raghavan, Business Line
Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad, says an ancient proverb. This is what comes to mind in the context of the Government's unprovoked resort to Operation No-Holds-Barred in the early hours of June 5 against Baba Ramdev and his followers at the Ramlila maidan. For the meticulous planning, stealthy preparations and thorough-going execution, even the colonial, Imperial British can learn a lesson or two from Independent, democratic India's present-day powers-that-be.
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The future of innovation: Can America keep pace? - Fareed Zakaria, Time
"The first step to winning the future is encouraging American innovation." That was Barack Obama in his State of the Union address last January, when he hit the theme repeatedly, using the word innovation or innovate 11 times. And on this issue, at least, Republicans seem in sync with Obama. Listen to Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or Mitch Daniels and the word innovation pops up again and again. Everyone wants innovation and agrees that it is the key to America's future.
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Shanti Bhushan's letter to Pranab Mukherjee on Ramdev crackdown - Shanti Bhushan, LensOnNews
(W)hat happened on Satuday night at Ramlila Grounds further strengthened our doubts whether the government was at all serious in dealing with corruption and having a strong Lokpal Bill. . Helpless and unarmed people, who were protesting peacefully against corruption, were assaulted without any provocation. Media reports indicate that this was done after government failed to reach an agreement with Swami Ramdev. Is that a sufficient provocation to assault unarmed people in the middle of the night? The high-handed an brutal manner in which the Grounds were evacuated shows that the government was committed to crush the people raising their voice against corruption.
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The bite is missing - John Samuel Raja D & Khomba Singh, Economic Times
The 2009-10 annual report of the Securities and Exchange Board of India says the capital market regulator initiated all of 10 cases of insider trading that year. "Insider trading is rampant in India," says Prithvi Haldea, chairman and managing director of Prime Database. "They are not caught because of multi-layering and poor infrastructure.
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Why the Congress wooed and then shooed the Baba away - R Jagannathan, First Post
When Baba Ramdev was bundled out of Delhi unceremoniously, it was a forceful message from the Congress-led UPA government that it was not going to vacate space for civil society to muscle in on its turf — unless the civil society members happen to be Sonia Gandhi groupies. It is also an indication that orders for the crackdown on the Baba came from the political power centre – Sonia Gandhi herself. It marks a new assertion of party over government in order to seize the political initiative from a bumbling Manmohan Singh.
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Accepting a nuclear India - Rajiv Nayan, The Diplomat
The international community is now looking at how best to bring India into multilateral nuclear export control regimes. During his November 2010 visit to India, US President Barack Obama delivered a number of speeches and issued a joint statement with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that contained some significant policy pronouncements, particularly over the accommodation of India in US and multilateral export control regimes.
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Farm loan scam - Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Asian age
It now transpires that there is a huge scam behind the farm loan waiver scheme and also on account of the more recently announced concessional interest rate and interest rate subvention schemes on agricultural loans. The scandal does not pertain to a few unscrupulous individuals nor is it a case of a small section of smart borrowers exploiting loopholes in the system. There is growing evidence to indicate that the scandal is a gigantic one and that the amounts involved are substantial. All of which calls for a detailed inquiry.
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From Abbottabad to worse - Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair
Salman Rushdie’s upsettingly brilliant psycho-profile of Pakistan, in his 1983 novel, Shame, rightly laid emphasis on the crucial part played by sexual repression in the Islamic republic. And that was before the Talibanization of Afghanistan, and of much of Pakistan, too. Let me try to summarize and update the situation like this: Here is a society where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumor of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk.
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Sow Mumbai, reap Karachi? - Mehreen Zahra-Malik, Newsweek
This was irony at its cruelest. Just as David Headley took the stand in Chicago and alleged that the terrorists behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks were trained by Pakistan Navy’s Frogmen, troops in Karachi were almost done retaking the PNS Mehran naval air base after a 17-hour standoff that left 10 soldiers dead.
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No money laundering in India! - Subhomoy Bhattacharjee, Financial Express
Tucked away in the government files is a strong indictment of India’s record in tracking money laundering by the world body for financial intelligence, of which India also is a member. If we are to get a sense of why the debate on black money is climbing all the wrong trees, this report is worth examining. The report by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which brings together the top 34 countries of the world and two multi-lateral bodies in a closed group, has noted that since 2006, when India passed its money laundering Act till now, not a single case has finally reached conviction.
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Real estate is synonymous with black money - John Samuel Raja D & Kausik Datta, Economic Times
Paromita Banerjee is livid. Her builder has asked her to make illegal payments to seal her Rs 40 lakh flat purchase in Navi Mumbai. The 32-year-old IT professional, who has never given or taken a bribe, has to pay Rs 2 lakh for water and electricity connections, even though these are her entitlements. And an equal amount for a parking slot, even though the Bombay High Court disallows the sale of common area. All in cash.
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Crackdown on Ramdev unwarranted; PM, Sonia responsible: Poll - K Balakrishnan, LensOnNews
UPA Government ministers and Congress party spokesmen have been coming up with a variety of justifications for the brutal midnight assault on yoga guru Baba Ramdev and his peaceful supporters in Ramlila Maidan in Delhi last Saturday. But an outraged public which saw it all play out on television is having none of it.
This is evident from an opinion poll conducted by LensOnNews among a cross sectional sample of 850 respondents across four major cities – Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Hyderabad – from June 7 to 9. Incidentally, the Congress and allies are the ruling party in the state in all the four cities where the poll was conducted. As many as 78% of the respondents felt that the police action against the Baba was unwarranted, against only 17% who felt there may be some justification. The poll findings carry a margin of error of 5 per cent.
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How to fix corruption issues in India's real estate sector - John Samuel Raja D & Kausik Datta, Economic Times
Hidden charges, delivery delays, broken promises, vanishing builders...Such frustrating, black episodes while making what is, arguably, the purchase of a lifetime for most people would have been history had an obvious piece of legislation come through. Instead, a real estate law has been in the making for about a decade as an idea and for the last three years as a draft.
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UPA's inclusion gets it wrong - Shankar Acharya, Business Standard
For more than seven years the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has touted its distinctive brand (so claimed) of “Inclusive Growth”. There is nothing wrong with the basic idea, which is that the fruits of rapid economic growth should be widely shared, particularly by the poor and marginalised segments of society. But the strategy deployed has been seriously flawed.
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NAC’s idea of minorities is irrelevant – and dangerous - Sanjeev Nayyar, First Post
The composition of India’s population has substantially changed since 1950; the cumulative experiences since then make it imperative to revisit the meaning of the word minority. It is worth noting that barring India, nowhere in the world is a minority defined by religion. In the United Kingdom, division is based on skin, color and race. However, racial minorities have no special privileges. In the US, affirmative action, not reservation, is allowed for racial minorities, and that too not for religious groups.
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Chinese entrepreneurs are leaving China - Gordon G Chang, Forbes
China’s rich, primarily driven by a sense of insecurity, are taking money out of their country. Many are actually preparing to move elsewhere. According to a new study, almost 60% of China’s “high net worth individuals,” defined as those possessing more than 10 million yuan in investable assets, are either considering emigration through investment programs or are completing the emigration process.
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India Inc's retail academy - Kalpana Pathak & Raghavendra Kamath, Business Standard
Fresh business plans of retail chains post the economic slowdown and dearth of talent in the sector have made retailers shift their strategy from hiring freshers to hiring trained staff. And creation of job-ready talent is the reason prompting entry of companies like--- Essar Group’s Aegis Global Academy, Bharti Group’s Centum Learning and Future Group’s Future Innoversity— launch their own courses in retailing.
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Scams have hobbled reforms and economic growth is in peril: ET survey - Economic Times
The government has lost focus of the business agenda as it scurries to put its house in order. That is the resounding reaction from respondents to two independent surveys that unambiguously pinpoint what is wrong with the ruling UPA government - it can't take decisions, and that is going to hurt economic growth.
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Trust gone, UPA's defeat in next poll is inevitable - G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, LensOnNews
In the life cycle of elected governments, a time comes when the public support decisively swings from one of enjoying inherent trust to one in which people have lost implicit trust. In case of some governments, this happens very rapidly and in some others, it takes a very long time as was the case with the Left Front in West Bengal which had an uninterrupted reign of 34 years. Usually, a major decision or action precipitates this dramatic shift of public perceptions about an elected government. In Left ruled West Bengal, the agitation in Singur provided the stimulus. In the case of the UPA government, the midnight crackdown on Baba Ramdev’s supporters – after meekly acquiescing to him and rolling out the red carpet at Delhi airport – has provided that spark.
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The UN declares Internet access a human right - Adam Clark Estes, The Atlantic
The United Nations counts internet access as a basic human right in a report that bears implications both to on-going events in the Arab Spring and to the Obama administration's war on whistleblowers. Acting as special rapporteur, a human rights watchdog role appointed by the UN Secretary General, Frank La Rue takes a hard line on the importance of the internet as "an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights, combating inequality, and accelerating development and human progress."
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How the real estate sector destroyed Rs 2,66,000 crore - R Jagannathan, Firstpost
A curious phenomenon exists in the real estate sector. In the last three-and-odd years, you know, I know, and the dog at the lamp-post knows, that land prices have only gone up, flats cost more, and our EMIs on housing loans have gone up. We are paying through our noses for the few square feet we want to call our home. Who gains when this happens? One presumes that the real estate companies and builders must be raking in the moolah.
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Poll finds people want leadership change; Rahul Gandhi preferred over Manmohan, Modi over Rahul - K Balakrishnan, LensOnNews
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government, mired as it is in a series of scams, unable to gain control over runaway inflation, on the backfoot in its tussle with Anna Hazare and civil society activists on the Lokpal issue, and facing public revulsion over its brutal crackdown on Baba Ramdev and his supporters, has clearly lost public standing across the nation. This is evident in the findings of a ‘Mood of the Nation’ poll conducted by LensOnNews which shows that voters are exasperated with the crisis-ridden Manmohan Singh government at the Centre, and are yearning for a change. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of voters want a change of government at the Centre, while only about half that number (32%) want the Manmohan Singh government to continue in office.
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Meet Ramdev the marketing guru - Namrata Acharya, Business Standard
From toothbrushes to night suits, from breakfast cereals to body cleansers, there is a spiritual touch in each item up for sale. Consumerism blended with spiritualism, courtesy religious gurus and organisations, is giving companies a run for their money. Yoga guru Ramdev’s credentials as a politician are yet to be established, but his pioneering marketing strategies as head of a Rs 1,100-crore diversified conglomerate are already the subject of case studies.
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How China could yet fail like Japan - Martin Wolf, Financial Times
Until 1990, Japan was the most successful large economy in the world. Almost nobody predicted what would happen to it in the succeeding decades. Today, people are yet more in awe of the achievements of China. Is it conceivable that this colossus could learn that spectacular success is a precursor of surprising failure? The answer is: yes.
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Battle for the jewel in the auto belt - Surajeet Das Gupta & Sharmistha Mukherjee, Business Standard
The CPI-backed All India Trade Union Congress (Aituc) has openly backed the striking workers and is playing a key role in the negotiations. The Maruti management has conceded the workers’ demand for a separate plant union but has made it clear that it cannot have members from outside the company. This stance however has not been acceptable to the workers, who have struck work for over 12 days. Instead, the workers have proposed a new union in which one-third of the members will be outsiders, giving Aituc entry into the closed portals of the company.
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Justice goes global - Thomas L Friedman, NYT
You probably missed the recent special issue of China Newsweek, so let me bring you up to date. Who do you think was on the cover — named the “most influential foreign figure” of the year in China? Barack Obama? No. Bill Gates? No. Warren Buffett? No. O.K., I’ll give you a hint: He’s a rock star in Asia, and people in China, Japan and South Korea scalp tickets to hear him. Give up? It was Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard University political philosopher.
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IAS design conducive to graft - Amitabha Pande, India Today
Do social origins and the cultural milieu in which one has grown up have a role to play in the kind of IAS officer one eventually becomes? At one level, all bureaucrats have been corrupt in some way or another - favouring friends or kinsmen or persons of a particular region, using the perks and freebies offered by PSUs and so on. Worse, many have readily condoned or did not resist the corrupt behaviour of those wielding political power. A few, however, become known for the voraciousness of their appetite for material acquisitions.
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Govt in lockdown – has the endgame begun? - Shekhar Gupta, Indian Express
Over the past three weeks I have been stopped by ordinary people at airports, in shopping malls, at a petrol pump, in a spiritual ashram, at the national athletic games in Bangalore and so on with a question that seems to have become a clamour: why are you in the media so scared of the Gandhis? Why is no one exposing their humongous stash overseas?
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Tamil Nadu: The cable wars - Archna Shukla, Indian Express
At least half-a-dozen broadcast networks or independent channels in the state are directly owned by politicians or their immediate family—Jaya Network is owned by Chief Minister and AIADMK leader J Jayalalithaa; Kalaignar TV is run by former Chief Minister and DMK leader Karunanidhi’s family; Mega TV was launched by Congress MP K V Thengabalu; Vasanth TV is floated by another Congress leader and MLA Vasantha Kumar; Makkal TV was founded by prominent regional party PMK leader Ramadoss and Captain TV is owned by Vijaykanth, a leading film star and founder of another regional outfit, Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam.
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Congress perceived as synonymous with corruption, yet retains support of traditional base - Chetan Bhattarai, LensOnNews
The “Mood of the Nation” poll by the LensOnNews.com has an unambiguous message from the voters—that the Congress party is corrupt. Stunningly, across all states and in all voter segments there is unanimity that the Congress party is more corrupt than the BJP, the principal opposition party at the Centre. Rarely do national surveys exhibit such a widespread and uniform adverse perception across the nation. And, when it comes to overall suitability for governance, the Congress trails the BJP yet again nationally but retains its edge over the BJP among the caste and community groups constituting its traditional base.
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Political order in Egypt - Francis Fukuyama, American Interest
While academic political science has not had much to tell policymakers of late, there is one book that stands out as being singularly relevant to the events currently unfolding in Tunisia, Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries: Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies, first published over forty years ago.1 Huntington was one of the last social scientists to try to understand the linkages between political, economic and social change in a comprehensive way, and the weakness of subsequent efforts to maintain this kind of large perspective is one reason we have such difficulties, intellectually and in policy terms, in keeping up with our contemporary world.
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Bugging Pranab: a high stakes play - First Post
The report that Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s conversations may have been tapped by sticking secret electronic devices in his chambers and that of his staff is a chilling reminder that Big Money now operates so close to the centres of power. Not that this is a surprise in India’s crony capitalist economy — ask Raja, Kalmadi, various Reliance executives and other recent entrants to Tihar jail — but it is surely a pointer to the stakes involved.
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Why now is the right time to bring home the black money from tax havens abroad - R Vaidyanathan
Thanks to Baba Ramdev, concern about vast quantities of black money and illegal wealth of Indians stashed in tax havens abroad has spread far and wide among the public in our country. Suddenly Switzerland has become a suspect destination and tax authorities have said they will monitor Indians travelling to that country and other tax havens. The current rulers claim that they have done more than any previous regime to deal with the issue of black money and tax havens. They question the credibility of earlier governments of V.P. Singh, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and others, and say that they did not do anything.
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When the honeymoon with civil society is over - Rajesh Tandon, Financial Express
Now, the honeymoon with civil society is over; the ministers of Manmohan Singh’s government have begun to denigrate civil society representatives as ‘fronts’ for other political parties; the leaders of Sonia Gandhi’s Congress party have called them ‘self-serving’ non-state actors now. Why this sudden and dramatic shift in just two months—from acquiescence to intimidation, from eulogising to denigration, from ‘glory to civil society’ to ‘let’s investigate these crooks’? History shows similar patterns.
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Sri Lanka’s bloody secret - Salil Tripathi, Mint
In 2009, the Sri Lankan army decided to move forward relentlessly to annihilate the Tamil Tigers. The government had tacit Western support and access to weapons from China, and India was not about to help the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), despite the exigencies of coalitions, particularly when the coalition was led by a party (Congress) whose leader, Rajiv Gandhi, the LTTE had assassinated in 1991.
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Senate pushes Pentagon on US-India defence ties - Ajai Shukla, Business Standard
The United States Congress has moved decisively to bridge a widening gulf between the defence establishments of India and America. In an unprecedented initiative, the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), which oversees the US Department of Defense, has ordered the Pentagon to submit a report by November 1 with a detailed assessment of the current state of US-India security cooperation; and a five-year plan for enhancing that cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region and globally.
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Corruptionomics - V Kumaraswamy, Business Standard
Like in most things in economics, corruption also has two sides - demand and supply. As our satyagrahis focus on the supply side, are we doing enough to tackle the demand for corruption? Earlier this month, Thailand’s Securities Commission’s chief had to resign for facilitating a meeting between two groups of shareholders in a listed shipping company in which he owned 100 shares. The staff cried conflict of interest capable of tarnishing the image of the regulator and refused to work till he resigned. Isn’t this the kind of ideal world our Anna Hazares are seeking?
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Gas prices: EGoM snubbed secretaries, ruled in RIL's favour - AM Jigeesh, India Today
Former cabinet secretary K M Chandrasekhar and a group of secretaries had fiercely opposed the pricing formula suggested by the Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) for natural gas produced from the Krishna-Godavari (KG) basin. Yet, the Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM) headed by Pranab Mukherjee chose to ignore the secretaries' observations. It instead fix the gas price at $ 4.2 (about Rs 175.5) per million British thermal unit (mmbtu) - close to what the RIL had been demanding. In his 31-page report submitted to the EGoM on gas-pricing, a copy of which is with Mail Today, Chandrasekhar said it will not be "prudent" to approve the RIL's gas-pricing formula.
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UPA’s legacy: jobless growth - Anil Padmanabhan, Mint
Key economic data released by the government on Friday shows that the first stint of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) generated a mere 400,000 jobs a year, compared with 12 million jobs annually during the tenure of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). During the period 2004-05 to 2009-10, growth in the economy averaged 8.43%, delivering the politically uncomfortable message: jobless growth. This revelation comes at a time when the UPA is battling charges of corruption during its second tenure and will lend fresh political ammunition to its critics.
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IIPM's Rs500-million lawsuit against The Caravan - Caravan
The article, titled “Sweet Smell of Success: How Arindam Chaudhuri Made a Fortune Off the Aspirations—and Insecurities—of India’s Middle Classes”, was written by Siddhartha Deb, a contributing editor at The Caravan and an accomplished writer and university professor based in New York. Deb’s profile of Arindam Chaudhuri, which shows how Chaudhuri built an image for himself and how he runs his educational institution, has been critically praised for both its thorough reporting and its spirit of evenhandedness.
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The £197 'nano house' designed to solve India's slum housing - Dean Nelson, Telegraph UK
One of India's leading companies has designed a £197 'nano house' it believes could solve the world's housing crisis and lift its two billion poor out of slum housing. Mahindra, the Indian automobiles to defence multinational company, designed the house as part of a Harvard design challenge to build a house for under $300.
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Power distance index and corruption - V Raghunathan, Economic Times
Not obvious, but related to corruption are two issues: power distance index and its corollary, the 'VIP' culture that permeates all aspects of our lives. Unless we challenge these two parameters which are innate to our culture, nothing much may change fundamentally. What is power distance index? Power distance index (credited to G H Hofstede) measures the extent to which the less powerful members of the society accept or expect power to be distributed unequally. Higher the acceptance and the expectation of power inequality, higher the power-distance. Typically, though not exclusively, the developed nations have lower power distance indices.
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Congress’s dangerous communal game: Will it cause a Hindu backlash? - G V L Narasimha Rao, LensOnNews
The recent ‘Mood of the Nation’ poll by this website has revealed that the Congress party is perceived to be utterly corrupt by all sections of the electorate, the lone exception being that of Muslims. (Read the Poll here) http://bit.ly/lKwpdf The questions naturally arise: why is the Muslim community out of sync with the nationwide trend, and is not the community equally affected by mis-governance and galloping corruption under the Congress-led UPA government? The Muslim community is well aware that this government has done precious little for their welfare. But now the Congress is seeking to appease them, by on the one hand targeting symbols of the Hindu community, and on the other by courting extreme elements among them and making shocking comments that appeal to their baser sentiments.
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A little house of secrets on the Great Plains - Financial Express
The secretive business havens of Cyprus and the Cayman Islands face a potent rival: Cheyenne, Wyoming. A Reuters investigation has found the house at 2710 Thomes Avenue serves as a little Cayman Island on the Great Plains. It is the headquarters for Wyoming Corporate Services (WCS), a business-incorporation specialist that establishes firms which can be used as “shell” companies, paper entities able to hide assets.
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Misunderstanding what it means to be secular - Terry Eagleton, New Statesman
Societies become truly secular not when they dispense with religion but when they are no longer greatly agitated by it. It is when religious faith ceases to be a vital part of the public sphere, not just when church attendance drops or Roman Catholics mysteriously become childless, that secularisation proper sets in. Like art and sexuality, religion is taken out of public ownership and gradually privatised. It dwindles to a kind of personal pastime, like breeding gerbils or collecting porcelain.
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Mayawati shaky in UP, Mulayam’s fortunes on the rise: poll - K Balakrishnan, LensOnnews
The Uttar Pradesh assembly elections are a year away, but the state has already turned into a political battleground. All the key players (BSP, SP, BJP and Congress) have high stakes in what is shaping up to be a tough four-cornered contest, the outcome of which will have repercussions beyond UP and for the Lok Sabha elections to come.
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The energy landscape of 2041 - Michael Klare, TomDispatch
Let’s see: today, it’s a story about rising sea levels. Now, close your eyes, take a few seconds, and try to imagine what word or words could possibly go with such a story. Time’s up, and if “faster,” “far faster,” “fastest,” or “unprecedented” didn’t come to mind, then the odds are that you’re not actually living on planet Earth in the year 2011. Yes, a new study came out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that measures sea-level rise over the last 2,000 years and -- don’t be shocked -- it’s never risen faster than now.
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Desperate Congress pressing all levers to arrest Narendra Modi before October - G V L Narasimha Rao, LensOnNews
There is a sinister plan hatched by the Congress party to implicate Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi in a web of legal cases relating to 2002 communal violence and some alleged police encounter cases. Accordingly, the Congress party led central government is working overtime to implicate, dethrone and arrest the popularly elected Chief Minister of Gujarat sometime between now and October this year.
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1953: A Kashmir story - Jagmohan, Deccan Chronicle
It was 58 years ago, on June 23, that Syama Prasad Mookerjee died as a detainee of the state government in the Srinagar Camp Jail at the relatively young age of 51. Soon after Mookerjee’s death, his mother, Jogmaya Devi, posed a poignant question to Prime Minister Nehru: “Had my son, a citizen of India, a member of the House of People, a leader of Opposition, no fundamental right to enter Kashmir without any obstruction from any quarter?” This question alone raised the level of national consciousness so high that no government, howsoever insensitive, could afford to maintain the status quo. Soon thereafter, the permit system was abolished and the need for establishing a just and meaningful relationship between Jammu and Kashmir and the rest of India gained both earnestness and urgency.
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The WikiLeaks you missed - Joshua E Keating, Foreign Policy
Since the first few Julian Assange-saturated months of 2011, the U.S. media have largely moved on to Arab revolutions and other sex scandals. But WikiLeaks has continued releasing embassy cables -- fewer than 16,000 of the more than 250,000 have been published so far. In contrast to its early, now-frayed partnerships with the Guardian and the New York Times, WikiLeaks is now working with local papers in countries like Peru, Haiti, and Ireland to release cables of national interest.
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Lord Vishnu's royal servants guard his riches - Ananthakrishnan G, Times of India
Observers talk of the symbolic significance of the practice of royal family members dusting sand off their feet when they emerge from the shrine. "It was meant to convey that the family members would not take home or misappropriate even a speck of sand belonging to Padmanabha," they say. In fact, the present head, Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma, religiously follows the rule of paying of Rs 151 and 55 paise to the temple if he fails to make it to the shrine on any day.
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Special report: How newspapers are faring - Economist
“WHO KILLED THE newspaper?” That was the question posed on the cover of The Economist in 2006. It was, perhaps, a little premature. But there is no doubt that newspapers in many parts of the world are having a hard time. In America, where they are in the deepest trouble, the person often blamed is Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, a network of classified-advertising websites that is mostly free to use. Mr Newmark has been called a “newspaper killer” and “the exploder of journalism”, among other things.
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Russians win the space race - Owen Matthews, Daily Beast
When the space shuttle Atlantis blasts off from the Kennedy Space Center today on its final mission, it won’t just be the 30-year history of the world’s only reusable space shuttle that is coming to an end—it will be a whole chapter of the space race. After the shuttle returns to earth in a twelve days’ time, the United States will no longer have a manned space flight program for the first time in five decades. More, for the foreseeable future it will be Russia, the U.S.’s old space rival, which will be the only country in the world regularly putting men and women into space.
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How China builds these, and why India never does - Economic Times
Just last month, China commissioned into operation the world's longest natural gas pipeline, the world's longest cross-sea bridge, and the world's longest high-speed rail link. In the next few months, the world's largest power plant will also become fully operational in China. What enables China to build such mega projects at dazzling speed and why India can never match up?
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Eyeing Kerala’s temple jackpot: But whose money is it anyway? - R Jagannathan, First Post
The riches found in the vaults of Thiruvananthapuram’s centuries-old Padmanabhaswamy temple have suddenly become the focus of envy and covetous glances all around. Since such riches are rare in any community or group, people are already debating what should be done with it. Nobody has stopped to think about who has the right to talk about the money or its use. We may all have our opinions on how our neighbours should spend their money, but should we be telling that till we are asked?
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Rahul's Aligarh rally washes out Cong hopes to pin Mayawati - Amandeep Shukla, India Today
It was touted as a 'kisan mahapanchayat' but what really transpired at the Numaish Maidan here on Saturday was just about an exhibition of a disorganised rally where ticket aspirants and party workers numerically overshadowed the farmers in attendance. The numerous posters, which had been put up by the local Congress activists all across Aligarh, indicated that it was a more an attempt to show political strength than a farmers' rally. The burst of rain in the morning further dampened the spirits as groups of people tentatively walked on the slushy ground.
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SP Mookerjee, the sacrificial lion of Indian politics - Adithya Reddy, DNA
For a man who founded and led a movement that has emerged as the sole challenger of Congress dominance in Indian politics, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee has received far less than his due from historians. References to him and his work, especially during the Freedom Struggle, are limited and often biased in ‘standard’ history books. Of all the sterling attributes of Dr Mookerjee, his courage stands out as exceptional. His fateful journey to Kashmir is just one example.
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America's secret romance with Islamism - Praveen Swami, Hindu
There is also, however, an ideological foundation for America's new policies: the notion that Islamists, unlike secular democrats, are in some way authentic, organic representatives of their peoples and cultures. The idea is tied profoundly to the role of religion in America's own civic life. In his 2009 speech to what is often called “the Muslim world,” Mr. Obama repeatedly invoked the common traditions of religion to legitimise his defence of democratic rights — not the secular traditions of the Enlightenment, from which they emerged.
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Govt stirs quota pot to woo Muslims - AM Jigeesh, India Today
With elections less than a year away in some key states, the UPA government has decided to stir up the politically sensitive issue of education and job reservations for Muslims. After dithering over its promise of providing quotas for Muslims in government jobs and education for well over seven years, the government on Thursday asserted that the "consultation" process over the subject was over. The Union home ministry is set to submit a "concrete proposal" for minority reservation soon, Union Minority Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid said.
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Sonia, PM differ on Cabinet reshuffle - Iftikhar Gilani, Tehelka
The Cabinet reshuffle intended to drop non-performers and those involved in corruption has got delayed following differences emerging between Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Sources said Sonia Gandhi will have the final word, while the prime minister has particularly contested the return of Punjab Governor Shivraj Patil and has opposed suggestions to change P Chidambaram’s ministry and profile.
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A King’s Royal Dilemma - Uma Vishnu, Indian Express
Uthradom Tirunal Marthanda Varma, head of the erstwhile royal kingdom of Travancore in Kerala and custodian of this temple and its traditions. Yet today, the ‘king’ is fighting a commoner’s battle in court: struggling to hold on to that last vestige of his dynasty, the Padmanabha Swamy temple.
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There has been no global warming since 1998 - James Delingpole, Telegraph UK
The headline of this post really shouldn’t be controversial. It chimes perfectly with what Kevin “null hypothesis” Trenberth wrote in that notorious 2009 Climategate email to Michael Mann: The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. And it’s what Phil Jones admitted in a BBC interview when he said that there had been no “statistically significant” warming since 1995.
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SG’s exit suggests that govt is really rattled on 2G scam - R Jagannathan, First Post
When lawyers start quitting government, it’s a sign of the times. Perhaps, the pressure of defending the government in so many scams is getting to them. Officially, the reason given by Solicitor General Gopal Subramanium for putting in his papers is Communications Minister Kapil Sibal’s decision to employ a private counsel to represent him against an affidavit filed by the Centre for Public Interest Litigation (CPIL). The affidavit alleges that Sibal favoured Reliance Communications by reducing penalties from Rs 50 crore to around Rs 5 crore when the latter unilaterally pulled the plug on its rural services covered under the Universal Service Obligation Fund Agreement (USOF).
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Why Modi magic continues - DP Sharan, Pioneer
Narendra Modi will complete a decade as Gujarat Chief Minister this November. Indeed, it has been a successful, yet arduous, journey for him. And, he remains as much a divisive figure as a unifier. Modi, the politician, continues to arouse contrasting emotions — some find a new-age ‘fascist’ in him, while others regard him as a modern-day Sardar Patel. On the economic front, however, the perception is starkly opposite. The biennial Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit, which the State has been hosting for the past 10 years to promote itself as the world’s favoured investment destination, has turned into a Modi admiration club, with captains of the Indian industry singing paeans to him.
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SC order is based on ideology, not on the Constitution - Arun Jaitley, Hindustan Times
The Police Act, 1861, provides for the appointment of SPOs. The language of the legislations may be different but various state police legislations have similar provisions. Those familiar with the ground realities will realise the utility of such SPOs who are representatives of the community to protect the community and supplement the normal police administration. The court’s judgement creates a crisis situation. The state will now have to recover arms from the SPOs. This, in itself, is a daunting task. Every SPO realises he would be on the Maoists’ hit list. He would have only two options left: either join the Maoists or continue to retain arms to protect himself from the Maoists.
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Gujarat: India's Guangdong - Economist
Chinese-style, big-ticket projects are part of Gujarat's formula, including refineries and ports, but so are networks of smaller firms and foreign companies which have now achieved critical mass in industries such as cars and pharmaceuticals. The state government uses the usual tricks to try to jump-start growth, including special economic zones. But more important, it has provided the bog-standard things that businesses pray for across India but often do not get—less onerous labour laws, passable roads, reliable electricity and effective bureaucracy.
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The Sitaram Kesri case: How dynasty trumped ethics - Daily News & Analysis
The Sonia camp said that the Congress had failed to capitalise on Sonia’s charisma because of organisational weaknesses. Sonia accepted the argument and started toying with the idea of taking over the party. She, however, made it clear that unless Kesri stepped down gracefully and invited her to take over, she would not opt for a coup. But Chacha was in no mood to oblige. The next chapter of the power struggle was put into motion. Worried CWC members held a series of secret conclaves to work out how to ‘install’ Sonia at the helm. Pranab Mukherjee, AK Antony and Jitendra Prasada were given the task of sounding Kesri out about retiring ‘gracefully’. Initially, Kesri’s ‘nephews’ Ahmad Patel and Ghulam Nabi Azad approached him. But Kesri laughed off the proposal.
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In defense of Murdoch - Roger Cohen, NYT
Fair warning: This column is a defense of Rupert Murdoch. If you add everything up, he’s been good for newspapers over the past several decades, keeping them alive and vigorous and noisy and relevant. Without him, the British newspaper industry might have disappeared entirely. This defense is prompted in part by seeing everyone piling in on the British hacking scandal, as if such abuses were confined to News International (we shall see) and as if significant swathes of the British establishment had not been complicit.
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Three blasts in Mumbai, two dead, 100 injured - NDTV
In a seemingly coordinated attack, three explosions took place in Mumbai on Wednesday between 6.30 and 7 in the evening - two in South Mumbai at Opera House and in Zaveri Bazar and one at Dadar West, in central Mumbai. The Home Ministry has confirmed a terrorist attack and Mumbai is on high alert. The Home Secretary of Maharashtra has said about 60 people have been injured and have been shifted to nearby hospitals. The largest number of injured are at Zaveri Bazaar, where the blast took place in the crowded Kahu gali, a street of eateries.
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3 bomb blasts in Mumbai; 21 dead, 141 injured - CNN-IBN
Terror struck Mumbai once again on Wednesday when three bomb blasts rocked some of the most crowded places of the city killing at least 21 people and injuring 141 others. The first blast took place at 6:54 PM at south Mumbai's crowded Zaveri Bazaar. Within a few minutes Opera House and Dadar, too, were hit by powerful explosions. The explosion at Opera House, described by Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithiviraj Chavan as a "high intensity blast", took place at 6:55 PM and was followed by the one at Dadar (7:05 PM).
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Democratic front's legacy? Seven blasts and counting - Ravikiran Deshmukh, Mid Day
Yesterday's serial blasts have shaken not only the common citizenry but also the foundations of the Democratic Front government, which has now seen seven blasts in Mumbai (see box) since it took over the reins of the state in 1999. And, this count is excluding the daring 26/11 attack and the blasts in Mazgaon and Vile Parle that accompanied it. Leaders from the Congress and the NCP admitted, off the record, that the chinks in the city's armour had been exposed repeatedly and that there was 'feeble' hope of preventing such a disaster in the future as well.
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Pak’s cult of victimhood - Sumit Ganguly, Deccan Chronicle
Not long after the horrific terrorist attacks on Mumbai in November 26, 2008, the Pakistan Prime Minister, Mr Yousaf Raza Gilani, publicly stated that while he shared India’s sorrow, he also wished to underscore that Pakistan itself was a victim of terrorism. Given the rising graph of wanton acts of terror that have swept across Pakistan since then, there is more than a kernel of truth to that seemingly fatuous and insensitive statement. That said, Mr Gilani’s claim requires greater scrutiny.
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Women in political dynasties: The distaff of office - Economist
Ms Yingluck’s victory in Thailand’s general election on July 3rd is the latest example of an intriguing and, it seems, growing trend: for the sisters, daughters and widows of former leaders to take over the family political business on the death, retirement or—in Mr Thaksin’s case—exile of the founder. There are now more than 20 female relatives of former leaders active in national politics around the world.
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Congress party’s cynical politics of Terror - G V L Narasimha Rao, LensOnNews
Mumbai has been struck once again. The city has faced nine terror attacks in as many years which killed 437 persons and injured over 500. Every time an act happens, there is an outpouring of public anger and disdain. But with passage of time, the noise subsides and the attack is forgotten. In the bustling city, life moves on.
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Look beyond LoC - Jagmohan, Deccan Chronicle
While we routinely claim that the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir acceded to India on October 26, 1947, and is now an integral part of the Indian Union, both in terms of national and international laws, we take little interest in what is happening in the vast area which has been in illegal occupation of Pakistan. The elections on June 26, held in a part of that area for its Legislative Assembly, for example, went practically unnoticed in our media. The strategic importance of this area is immense and China, with the collaboration of Pakistan, has been making extensive inroads into it.
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The Coming Cleantech Crash - Devon Swezey, EnergyCollective
The global clean energy industry is set for a major crash. The reason is simple. Clean energy is still much more expensive and less reliable than coal or gas, and in an era of heightened budget austerity the subsidies required to make clean energy artificially cheaper are becoming unsustainable. Clean tech crashes are nothing new. The U.S. wind energy industry has collapsed three times before, first in the mid 1990s and most recently in 2002 and 2004 when Congress failed to extend the tax credit that made it profitable.
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‘We are as vulnerable as Kabul’ - Julio Francis Ribeiro, Deccan Chronicle
Terrorism is sustained on publicity. Publicity is like oxygen for terrorism. After the 9/11 attacks, there have been no terror attacks in America because of its policing apparatus, but Mumbai continues to face terror strikes time and again. How different are we from Karachi, Kabul or Baghdad? You cannot compare the situation of Mumbai with that of the United States. We live in a very dangerous part of the world whereas the US is far away from the hub of the Islamic world. We are as vulnerable as Karachi and Kabul since the epicentre of jihad terrorism is now in South Asia.
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Black money case and the hoax between the lines - Ram Jethmalani, Sunday Guardian
Perhaps it was the persistent obstructionist attitude of the government, which appeared hell bent on protecting Hasan Ali that prompted the learned judges to record the introductory Part 1 of the order, which goes into details about the neo-liberal paradigm of government, and its implication on Constitutional governance. The behaviour of government during the hearings appears to have confirmed all the negative-governance manifestations of the neo-liberal paradigm. Anyone who has read the order will note these reaffirmations in its main body. Several questions arise from government's suspicious, indifferent and self-destructive behaviour, actively inviting upon itself yet again a stinging judgement from the Supreme Court.
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Why my father hated India - Aatish Taseer, WSJ
Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice." My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.
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Chidambaram must come clean on 2G - Yashwant Sinha, Express Buzz
Was the finance minister, in whose company Raja had met the prime minister on November 4, unaware of this letter? Can he claim that he was unaware of the press note issued by Raja in which he had clearly mentioned the advice given to him by the finance minister? How could Raja assert in his letter that the investments were as per the FDI policy of the government? And if this is indeed true, how has the ED issued the notice to Etisalat for violating Fema? Will a super-intelligent person like P Chidambaram explain his role in all this?
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Why China's infrastructure are not necessarily objects of awe - Minxin Pei, Indian Express
Indeed, India needs better infrastructure to improve the livelihoods of its own people. But it would be a mistake to view China’s lead in infrastructure development as a sign of Chinese strength. It would be an even bigger mistake trying to use China’s infrastructure as a benchmark of sound economic development or an achievement to emulate
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Are they just ‘useful idiots’? - S Gurumurthy, Express Buzz
Imagine. On the one hand, the present media adviser to the prime minister and one of the three present interlocutors of the government on J&K had worked to hurt India’s interests in the way the ISI was conspiring to do, by participating in the seminars organised by Fai and funded by ISI to “drive out India from Kashmir”; and on the other, the government of India was forced to send out an IAS officer from Kashmir cadre to contain that damage. The result is that those who, through Fai, were part of the ISI design, are now part of the UPA government.
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We are paying the price for panic - J Mehra, Business Standard
If the state of an economy is a true barometer of the health of economic governance in a country then the captains of ship India seem to have lost control on the rudder. The unfortunate paradox of the current situation is that with each attempt to tide over the choppy waters of inflation, the panicky captains of the Indian economy are pushing the ship further into a tailspin. In past 15 months, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has hysterically slapped 10 successive rate hikes on the banks with the hope that the jump in the banks’ lending rate by 400 basis points will tighten the flow of money and help bring inflation under control. Sadly, things have gone from bad to worse.
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Fai’s guests weren’t traitors, but just ISI’s ‘useful idiots' - R Jagannathan, First Post
The arrest of Kashmiri propagandist Ghulam Nabi Fai in the US, allegedly for failing to report the fact that he was working for the Pakistani government and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), raises many questions. The main thought: are Indian liberals unwittingly or wittingly turning out to be the ISI’s “useful idiots”? The term “useful idiots” was originally used to refer to Soviet sympathisers in the West, who naively thought they were friends of the Soviet Union. In reality, the Soviets had nothing but contempt for them. They were useful for propaganda purposes – and nothing more.
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Empowerment over reservations - Kruttika Nadig, Economic Times
For a businessman, Udyog Ratna awardee Ashok Khade has an incredible repertoire of childhood stories to tell. His story is compelling: from extreme poverty to heading one of the most sought-after offshore fabrication companies in Mumbai: DAS Offshore Engineering. DAS is the biggest employer among dalit-owned companies - with 4,500 employees - and is credited with building Mumbai's first skywalk at Bandra.
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NIA nails fake Indian currency to Pak mint - Nikhil S Dixit, Daily Bhaskar
In a major breakthrough which could establish Pakistan's direct involvement in the counterfeit currency racket in India, the National Investigative Agency (NIA) has found that Fake Indian Currency Notes (FICN) circulated in India are manufactured in a state-owned printing facility in Pakistan. According to NIA sources, investigators sent the seized counterfeit currency notes along with original Pakistani currency notes to the Committee of Experts, constituted by the security printing and minting corporation of India, asking the committee to scrutinise the currency notes and give their findings.
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Afghanistan is now India's problem - Sumit Ganguly, Foreign Policy
India is a significant player in Afghanistan. It has the world's fifth-largest aid program there, having committed $1.5 billion in developmental assistance. It has played a key role in reconstruction and has developed training programs for Afghan civil servants and police. India has made these investments in the country because its policymakers are keen on ensuring that a radical Islamist regime does not return to the country, that Pakistan not wield a disproportionate influence on any future government, and that Afghanistan might serve as a bridgehead for India's economic ties to the Central Asian states.
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Andhra and Telengana: A vast and bitter cultural divide - Kingshuk Nag, First Post
Editor’s Note: Noted journalist Kingshuk Nag’s meticulously researched book Battleground Telengana: Chronicle of an Agitation (Harper Collins, Rs 299) explores the complex issues and underlying causes behind the demand for a new state. In this edited excerpt, he details the marked cultural differences that separate the Andhra and Telengana people, drawing attention to the unequal relationship that has created deeply held bitterness about Andhra “arrogance” and sense of “superiority.”
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Green bootleggers and Baptists - Bjørn Lomborg, Economic Times
Of course, today's climate-change "bootleggers" are not engaged in any illegal behaviour. But the self-interest of energy companies, biofuel producers, insurance firms, lobbyists, and others in supporting "green" policies is a point that is often missed. Indeed, the "bootleggers and Baptists" theory helps to account for other developments in global warming policy over the past decade or so. For example, the Kyoto Protocol would have cost trillions of dollars, but would have achieved a practically indiscernible difference in stemming the rise in global temperature.
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India Inc goes global as government chokes economy - Dhiraj Nayyar and Shantanu Guha Ray, India Today
The cream of India Inc is making big ticket investments overseas rather than in India. Over the last 12 months, Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries has already invested $5 billion in Africa and the US. Reliance Industries expects to double its investment abroad in four years. Anil Ambani's Reliance-ADAG has invested $3 billion globally in 2011, including in mining projects in Indonesia in 2011. He expects to more than double that to $7 billion in 2015.
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A continent, sinking - Steven Erlanger, Foreign Policy
Europe isn't going quietly. In this season of continental crisis, both financial and existential, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has yelled at European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet. The European Union commissioner in charge of justice, Viviane Reding, has insulted Sarkozy, who has fired back. Leaders of smaller countries have openly complained about German pigheadedness and French arrogance. The Germans and the northern countries call the Greeks freeloaders, liars, and worse; the Greeks have said Germany should return gold and antiquities looted by the Nazis.
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Welcoming a US default - V Anantha Nageswaran, Mint
Financial markets have not quite priced in a US debt default scenario for two reasons: it is considered extremely unlikely. A “Hollywood” or “Bollywood” type last-minute happy ending is still expected. The second reason is that it is intellectually a daunting exercise to grapple with the consequences of the default. A default would greatly erode whatever prestige and influence the US still has. It is unlikely that the US dollar would rise due to “safe-haven” inflows. It is common sense that when a country defaults, it is much farther from being safe.
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His Master’s choice - Jatin Gandhi, Open
Panna Lal Punia is a man on a mission. As chairman of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, Punia says he is fighting to eradicate untouchability with all his might. Only, a large part of his and the Commission’s might is largely directed at catalysing the process of making the Congress the principal challenger to Mayawati in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls of 2012. Punia, also a Congress MP, has taken it upon himself to educate Dalits in the state about their rights, as well as the policies of the Congress-led UPA Government at the Centre.
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Three surprises and one lesson - Tamal Bandyopadhyay, Mint
The biggest surprise is perhaps the tone of the policy—the way it has blamed the government for doing nothing to fight the persistently high inflation. The rate hike, going by the RBI statement, is to “maintain the credibility of the commitment of monetary policy to controlling inflation”. But more important than that, its objective is to “reinforce the point that in the absence of complementary policy responses on both demand and supply sides, stronger monetary policy actions are required”.
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Yeddy defiant, will Karnataka go the UP way for BJP? - LensOnNews Bureau
As the Lokayukta of Karnataka Justice Santosh Hegde submits his report on illegal mining today, Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa remains defiant and refuses to quit. He has told the media that he has the support of his MLAs, MPs and ministers and sees no reason for his exit. For the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which has succeeded in cornering the Congress party led UPA at the national level, Yeddyurappa’s peccadilloes continue to haunt the party and weaken its campaign against corruption. With the monsoon session of Parliament starting on August 1, the national leadership of the BJP is in a mood to dump Yeddyurappa.
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Rupert Murdoch’s lust for newspapers - Aakar Patel, Mint
To those who love and understand this profession, Rupert Murdoch is the world’s greatest newspapersman and its finest editor. Among those who have crafted newspapers, a rare and beautiful talent, he is without equal. He has defined without question all modern tabloid journalism but arguably also most of its broadsheet trade. This might appear strange, but he isn’t prejudiced in that sense and doesn’t discriminate between short, fun-loving newspapers and tall, prudish ones.
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Why must our leaders keep kowtowing to the Chinese? - R Jagannathan, First Post
There are some people who put their foot in it. And there are others who use the opportunity to debase themselves and all of us. At a reception hosted by the Pakistani High Commission on Wednesday, Ram Jethmalani, a Rajya Sabha MP, made an impromptu speech seeking brotherhood with one neighbour and enmity with another. He said, like a true blunderbuss, “Unless India and Pakistan are locked in the embrace of love, they will eventually be destroyed. Do not accept China as your friend, China is an enemy of both…beware of them,” The Indian Express quoted Jethmalani as saying.
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India's Leading Export: CEOs - Carla Power, Time
Competitive and complex, India has evolved from a poorly run, centrally controlled economy into the perfect petri dish in which to grow a 21st century CEO. "The Indians are the friendly and familiar faces of Asia," says Ader. "They think in English, they're used to multinationals in their country, they're very adaptive, and they're supremely confident." The subcontinent has been global for centuries, having endured, and absorbed, waves of foreign colonizers, from the Mughals to the British. Practiced traders and migrants, Indians have impressive transnational networks. "The earth is full of Indians," wrote Salman Rushdie. "We get everywhere." Unlike, say, a Swede or a German, an Indian executive is raised in a multiethnic, multifaith, multilingual society, one nearly as diverse as the modern global marketplace.
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Greater Noida property crisis puts development at stake - Financial Express
Greater Noida’s land woes are a microcosm of a broader dilemma facing India: balancing the livelihoods of villagers with the need to maintain economic growth, revamp shoddy infrastructure and acquire enough land to build mass housing for urban dwellers. Like in many other parts of India, the development projects in Greater Noida have collided head-on with legal challenges by farmers, and some have succeeded in halting multi-billion dollar projects and regaining land acquired years ago.
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America: The great divide - Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post
We’re in the midst of a great four-year national debate on the size and reach of government, the future of the welfare state, indeed, the nature of the social contract between citizen and state. The distinctive visions of the two parties — social-democratic vs. limited-government — have underlain every debate on every issue since Barack Obama’s inauguration: the stimulus, the auto bailouts, health-care reform, financial regulation, deficit spending. Everything. The debt ceiling is but the latest focus of this fundamental divide.
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The Cameron precedent: Manmohan should come clean before Parliament on 2G,CWG and Cash-for-Vote scams - K Balakrishnan, LensOnNews
Prime Minister David Cameron had to go before British Parliament and render an abject apology – for his error of judgment in hiring as his communication chief in 2007 Andy Coulson, a former Editor of the News of The World, who has now been arrested for his culpability in the notorious phone hacking scam. It is not that anyone suspects that Cameron was even remotely involved in any way with the sleazy newsgathering practices of NOTW. The question hanging over his head was merely this: did he know about Coulson’s doings when he hired him?
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PM's troubleshooters - Hari Shankar Vyas, Pioneer
Everything is going like clockwork at the PMO. Kapil Sibal has refuted every allegation made by Raja on behalf of Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram and himself. But Raja’s statement has far reaching consequences. Sources say that the Prime Minister and his former Principal Secretary TKA Nair are a worried lot. It was a tough decision for Singh to appoint Pulok Chatterji as Principal Secretary in place of Nair.
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Does the BJP stand for anything? - Tavleen Singh, Indian Express
I have serious problems with the sanctimonious tones that the Lokayukta took when he damned the chief minister through a media trial. He is now guilty till proven innocent and this is against the fundamental principle of Indian justice. If we end up with a Lokpal, he will behave in exactly this way and those who support Anna Hazare’s campaign, should pay heed. Ironically, the BJP was almost the first political party to leap on to Hazare’s dodgy bandwagon without noticing how dangerous it is for Indian democracy to allow leftist crusaders to force their will on an elected government.
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I Accuse... A Raja puts PM in dock, shakes government - Sandeep Bamzai, India Today
After almost six months in jail number 2 of Tihar, when former telecommunications minister A. Raja finally got a chance to speak, he took no prisoners. On July 25, in the packed confines of Judge OP Saini's trial court in Delhi's Patiala House complex, he said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and then finance minister P. Chidambaram had full knowledge of the sale of fresh shares which allowed the 2G licencees to bump up their valuations. More importantly, if this was the crime then why were Tata Tele and S Tel who actually sold equity to NTT Docomo (26 per cent sold for Rs 12,300 crore) and Bahrain Telecom (49 per cent sold for Rs 1,000 crore) not being charged?
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Study on poll funds says cement sales linked to elections - Vandita Mishra, Indian Express
Cement consumption in India is related to the electoral cycle. There is a significant drop in cement purchase during the four-week campaign period prior to election day, especially in the case of Assembly elections, with the biggest dip in Andhra Pradesh and the smallest in Delhi. This slowdown speaks of an off-the-books builder-politician quid pro quo. These are the provocative findings of a new study that turns the spotlight on one channel of the opaque and understudied field of illicit campaign finance.
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Does the BJP stand for anything? - Tavleen Singh, Indian Express
For weeks now, I have been meaning to draw attention to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s abysmal performance in Opposition but something more topical has intervened. Now that the events in Karnataka have made the BJP the topic of the week, I finally have my chance to proffer some humble advice to our leading Opposition party. First, my views on what happened in Karnataka. I have serious problems with the sanctimonious tones that the Lokayukta took when he damned the chief minister through a media trial.
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CWG: PMO's lie on Kalmadi's appointment nailed - Harinder Baweja, India Today
The PMO is in the eye of a storm again over the appointment of Suresh Kalmadi as the chief of CWG organising committee. The CAG report on the CWG mess has blamed the prime minister's office for giving Kalmadi a free hand. Sports Minister Ajay Maken retaliated, saying that it was the NDA government, which was responsible for Kalmadi's appointment. However, Headlines Today has learnt what Maken is saying is not the whole truth. The CAG report on Commonwealth Games has blamed the PMO for allowing Kalmadi to be the head of CWG organising committee, when he was only supposed to be the vice-chairman of the OC.
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Madhu Kannan - CEO, BSE - The ‘Superman’ influence - James Lamont and James Fontanella-Khan, Financial Express
It was there that the 38-year-old chief executive of the Bombay Stock Exchange cut his teeth in the late 1990s, and where later he fell under the spell of John Thain, former CEO of the NYSE. Few close to him fail to notice the influence of “Superman” - as Mr Thain was known for his facial resemblance to Clark Kent - on his professional life.
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Haven-sent opportunities - Sukumar Mukhopadhyay, Business Standard
Boris Becker once declared himself a resident of Monaco but when it was discovered that he had stayed in Germany at his sister's house for a considerable period, he could not be treated as a non-resident in Germany. He would have avoided euro 1.6 million in taxes but ultimately had to pay euro 3 million as fine and undergo two-year probation. Such incidents make interesting reading but they give the wrong impression that tax havens are marginal aberrations, a mere sideshow, a playground for the rich and the famous. That is a myth.
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Deewaar 2: Salim vs Javed in Narendra Modi-starrer - Ajay Umat & Harit Mehta, Times of India
They haven't spoken to each other for the last 30 years. Nobody really knows why Bollywood's blockbuster pair separated after scripting hits like 'Sholay' and 'Deewaar'. Now, they find themselves on opposite sides in this Narendra Modi blockbuster.
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Global Stock Selloff: Is another financial crisis coming? - Michael Schuman, Curious Capitalist
Why are markets tanking? In my opinion, the only thing surprising about the selloff is that some people seem to be surprised by it. The ascent of stock prices earlier this year, especially in the U.S., was detached from the reality of the world economy. Investors seemed to be simply ignoring the constant drumbeat of bad news. Growth in the U.S. has been weaker than expected, unemployment remains stubbornly high and the housing crisis is far from over.
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Singur to Sanand - A K Bhattacharya, Business Standard
This is the shifting of a fully-built passenger car plant from Singur to Sanand in Gujarat — a distance of about 2,000 km. That journey — undertaken by over 3,340 trucks using 495 containers over the next seven months — made possible the realisation of a difficult dream. This was the dream to produce Nano, a small car with a price tag of Rs 1 lakh. The dream had turned difficult as just ten days before that meeting at Pant Nagar, Tata Motors had announced that it would shift the Nano car project from Singur to Sanand. Farmers’ agitation, led by Mamata Banerjee, in West Bengal had made the operation of the factory impossible.
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After Manmohan who? Modi preferred over Rahul as PM: Poll - K Balakrishnan, LensOnNews
Public disaffection is growing against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his government, even as it comes under challenge from a concerted opposition and civil society activists on multiple fronts over its non-performance, and even more, over its unresponsiveness to public opinion.
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Deven Sharma: Another Jharkhand boy shakes the world - Partha Sinha, Times of India
About four months after MS Dhoni's boys won the Cricket World Cup for India, another man from Jharkhand has now shook up the world. On August 5, Standard & Poor's, led by Jharkhand-born Deven Sharma, struck off the 'AAA' rating of the US, considered the Gold standard in the world of finance, for the first time since 1914.
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Stuxnet virus opens new era of cyber war - Holger Stark, Spiegel
The Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency, attacked the Iranian nuclear program with a highly sophisticated computer virus called Stuxnet. The first digital weapon of geopolitical importance, it could change the way wars are fought -- and it will not be the last attack of its kind. Stuxnet, a computer virus that can infiltrate highly secure computers not connected to the Internet, a feat previously believed to be virtually impossible, entered the global political arena more than a year ago, in June 2010.
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Who says Rahul Gandhi’s image is on an upswing? - GVL Narasimha Rao
The latest State of the Nation poll published by The Hindu-CNN-IBN says
that Rahul Gandhi leads the prime ministerial rankings with 19% of
voters rooting for him as prime minister, three times the number he got
in 2009. Is it right to conclude from this poll that Rahul Gandhi’s
popularity is rapidly rising? No. It is just that the rapidly falling
political stock of Manmohan Singh as prime minister has pushed up
ratings for Rahul Gandhi in the survey as he is the natural heir of the
dynasty controlled Congress party.
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In auto test in Europe, meter ticks off miles, and fee to driver - Elisabeth Rosenthal, New York Times
The car had been outfitted with the meter so that Mr. Van Dedem could take part in a trial of a controversial government tax proposal to charge drivers a fee for the miles they drive. The meter also factors in the cost to society in the form of pollution, traffic congestion, greenhouse gas emissions and wear and tear on roads.
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Earthscraper concept takes urban planning underground - Bridget Borgobello, Gizmag
This ambitious "Earthscraper" concept from BNKR Aquitectura seeks to
address several problems faced by Mexico City - a growing population,
the lack of new plots for construction, the need to conserve historic
buildings and height restrictions on new structures. "The historic
center of Mexico City is in desperate need for a pragmatic make-over,"
says BNKR. The solution - build an inverted pyramid underneath the main
plaza at the heart of the city.
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Rare documents on Bhagat Singh's trial and life in jail - Chaman Lal, Hindu
Digitalised records with the Supreme Court reveal some inspiring facets of the revolutionary. Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt offered themselves for arrest after throwing harmless bombs in the Central Assembly to 'make the deaf hear.' Their case drew worldwide attention. Also (Letters written by Bhagat Singh to British authorities) .
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Is UPA Surging or Crumbling? Two Polls, Two Projections - G V L Narasimha Rao
Two polls, one styled as the State of the Nation Poll by the CNN-IBN and another titled as the “Mood of the Nation” poll by the India Today over the past week have left everyone confused, if not about the real mood of the nation, then certainly about the ability of pollsters to gauge it correctly.
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Building blocks - Vinayak Chatterjee, Business Standard
The Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) is envisioned as a “global manufacturing and trading hub” with an influence area of 150-200 km on both sides of the proposed 1,534 km WDFC. The project aims to expand the manufacturing and services base in the region through development of international quality, investment friendly, integrated investment regions supported with high quality road and rail connectivity to and from ports and logistics hubs.
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How CBI betrayed Court to save Congress - S Gurumurthy, Express Buzz
The CBI’s dishonest U-turn is perfidious too. Its final report (Para 21-24) makes it clear that far from identifying the co-conspirators, CBI has worked to ensure that none of them was exposed. First, the CBI tells a blatant lie to the Court that despite strenuous efforts, it could not trace the “crucial witnesses”, Kalimuddin and his sister Salima Begum. It is a shocking falsehood.
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Welcome baby seven billion: we've room on Earth for you - Lynsey Hanley, Guardian
On one day – one minute – in the next month, the world's 7 billionth human resident will be born. The United Nations is marking the occasion on the last day of October with what it describes it as an "opportunity" to promote "7 billion actions" for environmental sustainability and women's education, estimating that the world's population will top out at 9 or 10 billion mid-century before declining as economic development matures in countries with higher birth rates.
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Decoding China’s aircraft carrier - Trefor Moss, Diplomat
The first aircraft carrier in the history of the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLAN’s), which began sea trials earlier this week and churned up no shortage of media conjecture as it got underway, has to be understood on two different levels: the symbolic and the purposive.
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Why software is eating the world - Marc Andreessen, WSJ
More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not. Why is this happening now?
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Jagan’s jumbo jump - Sreenivas Janyala, Indian Express
Just seven years ago, in May 2004, Jaganmohan had filed tax returns showing an annual income of Rs 9.19 lakh. Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, too, had declared his son’s income in his affidavit for the May 2004 polls. In the May 2011 Lok Sabha bypoll to Kadapa, Jagan, now YSR Congress Party chief, declared an annual income of Rs 36 crore.
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Accessibility vs. access - Maria Popova, NJL
A Rare Glimpse of William Burroughs’ Belongings, proclaimed a recent Fast Company headline. But what does “rare” really mean these days? A photograph indexed by Google is hardly “rare,” what with being instantly accessible to a few billion people. The real question, then, becomes how many will actually access what’s accessible and how this changes the rhetoric of rarity.
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An investor's guide to buying influence in China - Didi Kirsten Tatlow, New York Times
“Chinese people are good at guanxi,” said the novelist Fu Shi, whose real name is Hu Gang. “Of course, it’s not just a Chinese speciality. It exists in the West, in the United States, too. But in China, it’s just deeper.” So why did Mr. Fu write “Chinese Guanxi,” an advice book that teaches people how to cultivate social connections with dinners, expensive gifts and “red packets,” or cash-filled envelopes? Don’t they already know?
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Flying Sikhs woo NRIs - Sai Manish, Tehelka
The Punjabi expat community is vibrant, hardworking, well-heeled, politically aware and has strong links back home. That made the Punjabi NRI a safe bet for politicians looking to fund their poll campaigns. The NRIwas the politician’s cash cow and still continues to invest heavily in development works, at times even fulfilling election manifesto promises with his money. With Assembly elections just six months away, the NRIs have much more than their purse strings to loosen this time. They have been given the right to vote. And with close to 15 million Punjabis around the globe — many of them eligible to vote — leaders are making sure they make inroads into this new votebank.
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Tiruppur: Pollutes area, kills itself - Akshat Kaushal & TE Narasimhan, Business Standard
Once a bustling place with great ambitions, Tiruppur is facing a devastating reversal of fortunes because of the deadly industrial effluent that its industries have emptied into the ground and rivers nearby, as well as the resulting contempt order that Kandaswamy filed in the Chennai High Court some time ago. This order has recently forced the industry to shut down.
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Vedic rituals recognize the marriage of equals - Aakar Patel, Mint
Most of us are married under a Vedic ceremony we don’t really understand. We are familiar with the Christian wedding and its vows because of cinema and our familiarity with English. However, this exchange between groom and bride is quite recent when compared with the Vedic ceremony.
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Taliban's burqa bombers - Amir Mir, Express Buzz
The tactic of the Pakistan Taliban to use veil-clad female suicide bombers to effectively strike their targets without being intercepted has set alarm bells ringing for the security agencies which are already finding it hard to nip al-Qaeda and Taliban-sponsored terrorism in the bud.
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The grid at 200: Lines that shaped Manhattan - Michael Kimmelman, New York Times
In the old photograph, a lonely farmhouse sits on a rocky hill, shaded by tall trees. The scene looks like rural Maine. On the modern street, apartment buildings tower above trucks and cars passing a busy corner where an AMC Loews multiplex faces an overpriced hamburger joint and a Coach store. They are both the same spot. Not so long ago, all things considered, the intersection of Broadway and 84th Street didn’t exist; the area was farmland. “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011,” now at the Museum of the City of New York, unearths that 1879 picture of the Brennan Farm among other historic gems.
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We'll never get over it, nor should we - Peggy Noonan, WSJ
People are discussing the geopolitical implications of 9/11 and how the tragedy changed our country, and most of what's been said has been worthy and serious. But my thoughts, as we hit the 10th anniversary, are more local and particular. I'm in a New York state of mind. There were two targets, Washington and New York. Washington saw a great military institution attacked, and quickly rebuilt. In Washington people ran barefoot from the White House and the Capitol.
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The colour code - Sunanda K Datta-Ray, Deccan Chronicle
With a record three million aesthetic procedures last year, China ranks second to the United States. Students make up 80 per cent of the patients in Beijing because parents want their daughters to be beautiful to find husbands or jobs more easily. Most operations are scheduled for the summer holidays before college or high school opens. Westerners must find this effort to copy them by correcting nature’s handiwork an amusing compensation for being forced to defer to China’s rising might.
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India-Pak border can be seen from space! - Chris Parsons, Daily Mail
Snaking for hundreds of miles across the earth's surface, this spectacular picture shows one of the planet's land borders like never before. The dramatic picture shows a bright orange line jutting across the earth, indicating the border between India and Pakistan. The stunning image of the earth, taken from the International Space Station last month, also shows busy cities show up as bright clusters hundreds of miles apart.
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India's Detroits: Pune, Gurgaon, Chennai...and now Gujarat? - Sumant Banerji & Manu P Toms, Hindustan Times
With the Nano, Gujarat's ambition found the launchpad it was looking for. Within a mere three years, it has attracted two more companies - Ford and Peugeot - to invest in the state. The biggest player, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd (MSIL), is also close to finalising a million-unit car plant in the state. If that deal goes through, cumulatively, the state would have received an investment of at least R16,000 crore by 2017 from Tata, Ford, Peugeot and Maruti, and the total vehicle production in the state would have shot from just 85,000 units in 2008 to 7,65,000 units by 2014.
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In case you wondered, a real human wrote this column - Steve Lohr, Business Standard
“WISCONSIN appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3.” Those words began a news brief written within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-UNLV football game earlier this month. They may not seem like much — but they were written by a computer.
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St Thomas: The making of a saint - Sandhya Jain, Pioneer
As Christian evangelists intensify efforts to bring India under their sway, their brethren in the south are trying to (mis)use current excavations at Pattanam to revive the myth of Apostle Thomas arriving in the country in the first century AD and establishing a fledgling community. They are trying to link the ancient port of Muziris with Pattanam, where Thomas reputedly landed, though Muziris was more logically Kodungalloor, where the river joins the sea.
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The buzz 'n' the biz: Formula 1 phenomenon in India - Aabhas Sharma, Business Standard
When Formula 1 cars, high on jet fuel, race down the tarmac in speeds of up to 320 km per hour for three days late October in Greater Noida, Suresh Kalmadi may finally get reason to smile. It was, after all, the discredited and jailed ex-president of the Indian Olympic Association who first invited Bernie Ecclestone in 2007 to bring his F1 races to India. Never the one to miss an opportunity to hit the headlines, Kalmadi had said F1 would come to India in 2010.
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Vision for a new Nalanda - Amartya Sen, Hindu
Nalanda University, the world's oldest centre of higher learning, is being re-established through an Asian initiative, involving India, China, Singapore, Japan and Thailand. Amartya Sen, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University and chairman of the Interim Governing Board of Nalanda University, believes that Nalanda stands for the passion of propagating knowledge and understanding. It was a residential university, and at its peak had 10,000 students from many countries.
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How Germany gets its logistics right - Mohan Murti, Hindu
Logistics is one of the key pilasters of Germany's competitiveness, paving the way for added industrial value, the movement of goods and cooperation between companies. German logistics industry occupies the third position in the country's GDP — weighing just behind its international trade and the automotive sector.
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It's raining laptops in Tamil Nadu - TE Narasimhan, Business Standard
If you are a student, a housewife or a prospective dairy farmer, you may want to make a beeline for Tamil Nadu where it seems to be raining gifts. This year, TN’s Jayalalithaa-led government will distribute close to a million free, 15.4 inch Rs 14,000 Acer laptops to students in the state. Housewives will soon see Rs 1,000 mixies and Rs 2,200 wet grinders adorning their kitchens. (Rs 1,250 crore has been alloted this year to cover 25 lakh familes). Over 60,000 will welcome cross-bred jersey milch cows worth Rs 2,300 into their homes, thirty per cent of them going to the Adi Dravida and scheduled tribes.
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Opening up new vistas - S Saroj Kumar, Financial Express
When the Union Cabinet recently approved the proposal to inject R18,500 crore into the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor Development Corporation (DMICDC), it gave a shot in the arm for setting up seven new cities along its route. The 1,483-km proposed dedicated rail and road freight corridor passes through six states—Uttar Pradesh, National Capital Region (NCR) of Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra, connecting Dadri in NCR with Jawaharlal Nehru Port near Mumbai.
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O Captain! My Captain! - Ashok Malik, Asian Age
As an importunate young boy, I once asked Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi for an autograph at a social gathering. It was not the right occasion and I was intruding. Pataudi didn’t say, “No.” He only moved his eyebrows and gently shook his head, almost as if he were doing me a favour. I slunk away. He generously gave me his autograph at another and more appropriate time, but that’s a different story.
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The magic of social enterprise - Rasheeda Bhagat, Business Line
While the brave talk vis-à-vis corruption is still very much at the theory stage, there are many real, and unsung, initiatives happening at the ground level across the country. One of these pertains to the Sankara Eye Care Institutions headquartered in Coimbatore and run by its founder and managing trustee, Dr R.V. Ramani. The objective of this social entrepreneur's 35-year honorary service is to bring quality vision care to the poor and underprivileged, especially in rural India.
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Gurgaon grief - Economist
Gurgaon is a global centre for outsourcing back-office services. Here and in other such hubs around India, routine office work and data analysis are carried out for a variety of corporate customers, many from rich countries (so their tasks have been offshored as well as outsourced). The work can be sophisticated: crunching the profit-and-loss numbers of listed companies for Wall Street analysts, or teasing spending patterns from the data gathered by supermarket tills.
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Where Delhi Metro went off track - R Dinakar, Business Line
It is now almost a decade since the Delhi Metro commenced its operations in the National Capital Region. A project substantially financed by Japanese soft-loans has grown with time to become a ‘lifeline' for the people of Delhi. Yet, the entire network continues to be heavily reliant on imported equipment and spares.
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The next generation of women entrepreneurs - Radhika P Nair & Sreekala G, Economic Times
Jessie Paul was not yet 35 when she became Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of IT major Wipro Technologies. Five years on Paul, quit her high flying corporate career to venture out on her own. She set up a marketing advisory firm, Paul Writer and thereby joined a growing band of women entrepreneurs creating high growth business ventures.
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Taxila aglow, but Nalanda in shadow - Jayant V Narlikar, Deccan Chronicle
Although we call it a university, Takshashila was patterned differently from today’s recognised structure of a university. It had distinguished scholars from all over the subcontinent and each one operated a school under their own jurisdiction. Students would decide as per their interests whom to choose as their teacher. Thus Dhaumya Muni, Nagarjuna and Atreya were part of this system. It was here that Chanakya taught Chandragupta, who later went on to found the mammoth Maurya Empire.
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Karzai abandons peace talks with the Taliban - BBC News
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said his government will no longer hold peace talks with the Taliban. He said the killing of Burhanuddin Rabbani had convinced him to focus on dialogue with Pakistan. Former Afghan President Rabbani was negotiating with the Taliban but was killed by a suicide bomber purporting to be a Taliban peace emissary.
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An Indian Formula - Daksh Panwar, Indian Express
On October 30, India will host this orchestra for the first time, with Sutil and 23 other drivers, including India’s Narain Karthikeyan and Karun Chandhok, participating at the Buddh International Circuit on the outskirts of Greater Noida, nearly 60 km from New Delhi. While India is not new to the sport—Karthikeyan, the first Indian on the grid, has been around since 2005—and there is a substantial fan following as well, F1 certainly is new to a large number of Indians.
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How yoga won the west - Ann Louise Bardach, NYT
The party planning is in full swing throughout India. Never mind that the big day, Jan. 12, 2013, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Vivekananda, is more than 15 months away. Not too long ago, Vivekananda, a household name in his homeland, was famous here as well, as the first missionary from the East to the West.
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Helping the poor: Harnessing brains on affordable houses - Leslie D`Monte, Business Standard
Vijay Govindarajan, now a professor who teaches international business at the US-based Tuck School of Business, has a dream that could become a reality soon. He wants even the ‘very poor’ to have a house for just $300 each (around Rs 15,000). Along with a marketing expert, Christian Sarkar, he wrote a blog on the website of Harvard Business Review about this possibility last year, and followed with a contest.
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Unmanned aerial warfare: Flight of the drones - Economist
Over the past decade UAS have become the counter-terrorism weapon of choice. Since 2005 there has been a 1,200% increase in combat air patrols by UAVs. Hardly a month passes without claims that another al-Qaeda or Taliban leader has been taken out by drone-launched missiles. There are now more hours flown by America’s UAS than by its manned strike aircraft and more pilots are being trained to fly them than their manned equivalents.
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Squeezed out in India, students turn to US - Nida Najar, NYT
Ms. Mohan, 18, is now one of a surging number of Indian students attending American colleges and universities, as competition in India has grown formidable, even for the best students. With about half of India’s 1.2 billion people under the age of 25, and with the ranks of the middle class swelling, the country’s handful of highly selective universities are overwhelmed.
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The slum economy rises - Kala Vijayraghavan & Ratna Bhushan, Economic Times
Marketing expert Jagdeep Kapoor, who advises FMCG companies catering to this market, estimates that Indian slums account for Rs 30,000 crore of spending. This is growing at 20-25% a year, he adds, but companies haven't looked at it in earnest. "It is a market under their noses waiting to be tapped," he says.
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The great disruption or the big shift? - Thomas L Friedman, NYT
When you see spontaneous social protests erupting from Tunisia to Tel Aviv to Wall Street, it’s clear that something is happening globally that needs defining. There are two unified theories out there that intrigue me. One says this is the start of “The Great Disruption.” The other says that this is all part of “The Big Shift.” You decide.
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Manipur: Failed state? - Jaideep Mazumdar, Times of India
It takes mere moments after one lands in Manipur to deduce that the state is well and truly withering away. This landlocked province in India's troubled northeast, wracked by militancy for unending years, is like a gradually imploding minefield. Abject poverty, alarming unemployment, lack of development, massive corruption and absence of governance is pushing Manipur to the brink of being a 'failed state' - perhaps India's first in the modern era.
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Maran & Bros - Gopu Mohan, Indian Express
For over four decades, the Marans have walked the corridors of power in the national capital. While they did so, they flexed their financial and political muscle—first, father Murasoli Maran and later his sons, Dayanidhi and Kalanidhi. The younger Marans are among the richest in the country and among the most influential in Tamil Nadu, lording over an empire that includes the largest media house—20 television channels led by the flagship Sun TV which, the company claims, covers nearly 100 million households; 45 FM stations; one of the biggest DTH services; two newspapers, Dinakaran daily and the eveninger Tamil Murasu, and four magazines—a film production and distribution company and an airlines.
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Are Smartphones becoming smart alecks? - Geoffrey A Fowler, WSJ
Now even your phone talks back. Matt Legend Gemmell, a software designer from Edinburgh, got a new Apple Inc. iPhone on Friday and asked it: "Who's your daddy?" "You are," the phone answered, in the voice of an authoritative man. Earlier, he commanded: "Beam me up." This time, the iPhone responded: "Sorry, Captain, your tricorder is in Airplane Mode."
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The Bollygarchs’ magic mix - Economist
Adaptable, ingenious and combustible, the family firm remains the backbone of India’s private sector, not an anachronism. “This is politically incorrect,” jokes Kumar Mangalam Birla, who runs Aditya Birla, the third-biggest family business house by sales, before going on to argue that the family, and the vim it brings, is an essential part of India’s economy. There is no easy way to categorise these business houses, but vintage is one approach.
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Slow Cities: Big idea for small towns - Saira Kurup, Times of India
The Cittaslow or "Slow City" movement, born in Italy in 1999, is one such growing network of cities that wants to improve the quality of life of their people, resist the homogenization and globalization of towns, protect the environment, promote cultural diversity and uniqueness of individual cities and a healthier lifestyle. It grew out of the Slow Food movement in Italy as a way of promoting sustainable ways of life in cities.
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A PM in exile - Varinder Bhatia, Indian Express
He starts his day by preparing a cup of coffee for himself, comes back from work and opens the door to his three-room apartment, draws a monthly salary of 300 USD (about Rs 16,000), works for around 18 hours a day. He is Lobsang Sangay, the Harvard-educated Prime Minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile, the political successor to the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso who renounced his political authority in March this year.
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A Silicon Valley school that doesn’t compute - Matt Richtel, NYT
The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard. But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.
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Why I left India (Again) - Sumedh Mungee, NYT
Our three-bedroom flat in Defence Colony, Indiranagar, was so comfortable and so American-friendly that my friends called it the Green Zone. And yet, two years and nine months after our move to India, on one of our regular evening jogs along our impossibly leafy street, my wife and I found ourselves discussing not whether we should return to the U.S., but when. A month later, we were back in California.
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The Outsider - Suketu Mehta, Daily Beast
Of the 50-odd people caught up in the insider-trading scandal, “most everyone that’s been charged has pled guilty,” notes Rajaratnam. “Nobody’s fought it. They’ve taken the plea.” But he decided to plead not guilty, and was later convicted on all 14 counts of insider trading, and is now going to jail for 11 years. Why didn’t he take the plea?
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Heard the one about the eurozone, and the haircut? - Michael Roddy, Reuters
Every dark cloud has its humorous lining and Europe's seemingly non-stop debt and currency crisis is no exception. From the heavily indebted nations of the euro zone, which seem to be dragging the rest of the continent down with them, to the finance ministers, prime ministers and chancellors trying to steer the ships of state safely clear of the debt iceberg, no one escapes the humorists' barbs.
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Think again: Nuclear power - Charles D Ferguson, Foreign Policy
The United States is reviewing its safety procedures for nuclear power, but not changing course on it; overall support for the energy source among Americans has hovered around 50 percent since the early 1990s. In France, which gets 78 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, President Nicolas Sarkozy said shutting down reactors was "out of the question." And as for China, India, and South Korea -- countries with a growing appetite for nuclear power that account for the bulk of active plant construction -- only the first has put any of its nuclear plans on pause, and that's just pending a safety review.
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India's first Formula One weekend has begun! - Dearton Thomas Hector, India Today
With India's first Formula One Grand Prix due to make a screaming start in less than 48 hours, the post-Diwali mood in the National Capital Region was dampened a bit when heavy-metal group Metallica's performance had to be postponed to Saturday evening. But the Lady Gaga after-party bash on race Sunday near the Buddh International circuit in Greater Noida is on schedule. So far.
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Aiming for 'higher' learning - Jyoti Pande Lavakare, Business Standard
It isn’t just N R Narayana Murthy who feels that the Indian education system is decaying. When he articulated his disappointment at the declining quality of engineers graduating from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) earlier this month, he was only saying what the rest of us are thinking. And if the IITs and the Indian Institutes of Management are presenting lower quality engineers and managers, can you imagine what must be happening at local-level colleges in tier-III towns and cities, the underbelly of modern, shining India?
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David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street - Drake Bennett, Business Weak
David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up. Graeber is a 50-year-old anthropologist—among the brightest, some argue, of his generation—who made his name with innovative theories on exchange and value, exploring phenomena such as Iroquois wampum and the Kwakiutl potlatch.
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Brand Metro - Sweta Dutta, Indian Express
Over the last decade, the country has got two new Metros and at least ten more cities are expected to get one in the coming decade. Though riddled with issues of land acquisition, fund crunch, red tapism and lack of coordination among agencies, these other cities with planned Metro systems take their inspiration from Delhi Metro’s success story.
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The only living master of a dying martial art - Stephanie Hegarty, BBC
A former factory worker from the British Midlands may be the last living master of the centuries-old Sikh battlefield art of shastar vidya. The father of four is now engaged in a full-time search for a successor. Nidar Singh, a 44-year-old former food packer from Wolverhampton, is now thought to be the only remaining master. He has many students, but shastar vidya takes years to learn and a commitment in time and energy that doesn't suit modern lifestyles.
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Krishna Janmashtami festival in Lahore - Haroon Khalid, Friday Times
The Neela Gumbad Valmiki is one of the two functioning Hindu temples in Lahore, a city which was once ruled by Hindus, but now only has about 100 Hindu families. To avoid recognition and hence the social stigma attached to being a Hindu, most of the younger people have adopted Christianity, and have taken up Christian and Muslim names, like Yaqub, Rehmat, etc. However, during festivals, like these, they revert to their Hindu traditions.
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Ahmedabad Muslims find way around aum for yoga - Javed Raja & Gopal Kateshiya, Indian Express
Every day at 7.30 am in Sardar Baug, a public garden in the Walled City area of Lal Darwaja in Ahmedabad, Muslim women in burqas and men in kurta pyjamas practise yoga. As their instructor, Chandrika Kansara, begins the session with the chanting of aum, her trainees, almost all of them Muslims, follow her with the sound of all...aah...ou. It all began in 2004 when Naresh Patel, then additional commissioner of police (Traffic), started yoga sessions for his personnel in the Children’s Park in Sardar Baug.
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In China, tensions rising over Buddhism's quiet resurgence - Calum MacLeod, USA Today
Mao's efforts to strip China of capitalism and religion while imposing socialism resulted in the destruction of hundreds of Buddhist temples and the deaths of thousands of monks. Just a decade ago, the institute survived a crackdown in which Chinese officials ordered the partial destruction of its buildings. The late Mao's vision has given way to a more capitalistic and seemingly more tolerant version of communism. But Buddhism's broadening popularity here is stoking tension between Buddhist monks who demand religious freedom and their longtime foe: Communist Party leadership 1,500 miles away.
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Eurozone crisis: What it means for East and West - Ian Morris, BBC News
In October 1911, China rose up in revolution. Four months later the last emperor had fallen and European moneymen were flocking to Beijing, eager to finance the bankrupt new republic. In October 2011, another European moneyman headed for Beijing. But Klaus Regling, head of the European Financial Stability Facility, did not go there to lend to China. He was there to borrow, asking China to save Europe from economic disaster.
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Monsters Inc to Maharajas: Pixar animator draws his way back to Indian roots - Sandip Roy, First Post
Sanjay Patel has come a long way from the motel desk on Route 66. He’s drawn the little book of Hindu deities which made our gods Hello Kitty cute. He’s brought out the big poster book of Hindu deities. He’s done his version of an illustrated Ramayana. He’s writing a children’s book about how Ganesha breaks his tusk. But like many Indian-American kids, he didn’t really think too much about his own culture while growing up.
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On the frontline of India's encephalitis war - Soutik Biswas, BBC
As a senior paediatrician at the Baba Raghav Das Medical College, Dr Kushwaha has been on the frontline of a decades-old battle against encephalitis, which has claimed some 6,000 lives at his hospital alone since 1978. Horror stories are nothing new to Gorakhpur. In one case in 2007, local police picked up a dairy farmer and owner of a blood farm - "a ruthless modern-day vampire", according to one account - who locked up men and extracted blood to sell it in the black market. But it is encephalitis that has been the leitmotif of Gorakhpur's unending misery.
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As Asia booms, what is cost of success for its young - Saira Syed, BBC
On a Saturday night in Singapore, Nicol and his friends are dancing in a dark and crowded room at one of the most expensive new clubs in the city. As the music reaches a crescendo, the 25-year-old management consultant pumps his fists in the air. For Nicol and others like him partying across the city and the region, it would seem that there has never been a better time to be young and in Asia.
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Jeff Bezos owns the web in more ways than you think - Steven Levy, Magazine
“What I’m about to show you,” Jeff Bezos says, “is the culmination of the many things we’ve been doing for 15 years.” The CEO of Amazon.com, in regulation blue oxford shirt and jeans, is sitting in a conference room at his company’s spiffy new headquarters just north of downtown Seattle. It is mid-September, exactly one week before he will introduce a new line of Kindles to the world. He has already shown me two of them—one with a touchscreen, the other costing just $79—but that’s not what’s truly exciting him. It is a third gadget, the long-awaited Amazon tablet called the Kindle Fire, that represents his company’s most ambitious leap into the hearts, minds, and wallets of millions of consumers.
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The formula of collectivism - Ravi Shanker Kapoor, Business Standard
Do we need Formula One in a poor country where potable water is not available to millions of people? Such rhetorical questions are asked whenever big events, especially related to sports, are organised in India. The rhetoric exposes the intellectual bankruptcy of those who raise such questions. For, if this line of thinking is accepted in its totality, many things would have to be banished from India. The Indian Space Research Organisation, or Isro, set up in 1969 for the research and development of vehicles and activities associated with the exploration of space within and outside of the earth’s atmosphere, would be among the first to be shut down.
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Hunar hai to kadar hai - Sunil Jain, Financial Express
Why are 2 lakh MBA seats in the country not finding any takers? Ditto for an equal, if not larger number of seats in engineering colleges across India. That, in a nutshell, is the logic behind the hunar hai to kadar hai (you will be respected if you have a skill) tagline of the R40-50 crore ad blitz the National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC) has got ready to glorify the idea of vocational skilling, NSDC chief Dilip Chenoy tells me over a breast of chicken at New Delhi’s IIC.
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7aam arivu: Bodhidharma's gene - Rohini Murlikumar, Centre Right India
One of the year’s highly anticipated Kollywood movie 7 aam arivu( 7th sense) was released this Diwali with much fanfare. This movie generated tremendous interest thanks to its central theme – biogenetically linking a rare passage from history of an Indian prince to a current day persona . Heightened interest generated by the movie can also be attributed to the fact it was directed by Murugadoss, a notable name in what looks like an inexhaustible assembly line of Kollywood directors endowed with fine blend of creativity storytelling skills and craftsmanship.
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Two Regions and a Mountain Train - Arun Sharma, Indian Express
The Banihal-Qazigund line is part of the larger project of linking Kashmir Valley with the country’s rail network. Though it won’t be before 2017 that the first train from Baramulla travels downhill to the plains of Jammu, the Banihal-Qazigund line is a key step towards that larger dream—the 345-km-long Jammu-Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla railway line.
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That antique land of Awadh - Veena Talwar Oldenburg, Indian Express
In 1856, when the last king, Wajed Ali Shah, refused to sign a ridiculous treaty, the British annexed his kingdom and kept him under house arrest in a suburb of Calcutta. This would be the last territorial acquisition by the Company in India. In 1877, the British, in a bid to trim their budget, merged Awadh with its neighbour, calling the new province the United Provinces of North-West Provinces and Awadh, with Allahabad as the capital. This infelicitous arrangement, with its clunky name persisted, though Sir Harcourt Butler, the chief commissioner, ordered the capital back to Lucknow in 1920. Lucknow became a slightly larger dot on the map of British India.
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The New Motown - Mandar S Chitre & Adam Halliday, Indian Express
Past what seems like unending lines of trucks stretching on both sides of the six-lane road waiting for Tata Nanos to crawl into their trailers, a chai wala points to the left and says, “Phod wahan hai.” Gopal Bharwad, 19, from Motipura village, is referring to the US car maker Ford Motor Company, one of the three manufacturers that are setting up base near the town of Sanand, 22 km from Gujarat’s commercial capital of Ahmedabad. Besides ‘Phod’, ‘Phor’ and ‘Four’, there is ‘Peejot’—French car-maker PSA Peugeot Citroen.
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Tragedy of Muslim Civilization - Aftab Zaidi, Pak Tea House
The 2011 Nobel Prize announcements were recently made at a ceremony held in Europe. It is rather sad that no Muslim was able to garner this prestigious award. After all Muslims constitute 21 percent of the total world population and are around 1.57 billion. It is an irony that so far the Muslim world has produced only nine Nobel laureates since the inception of this award by Alferd Nobel in 1895.
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‘I would love to be an Indian citizen’ - Bishakha De Sarkar, Telegraph India
Call him what you will. Some know him as Tully Sa’ab, and some as Sir Mark. Most would rather address him as Sir Tully — Indians, after all, would think it impolite to call him by his first name. But Mark Tully, arguably the best known broadcast journalist in India, is not troubled. Instead, he revels in the many vignettes — reflected perhaps in the various forms of address — that is India.
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#SunnyLeone@Home - Rohit Bansal, Pioneer
There are at least three regulators claiming to do self-regulation in the media space. Justice AP Shah, a former chief justice of Delhi High Court, guards the broadcasting contents complaints council (BCCC), where he and a panel of 12 other notables carry societal responsibility towards non-news TV (IBF) channels. Justice Markandey Katju, till recently a celebrated Supreme Court judge, heads the Press Council. Justice JS Verma, a former chief justice of India, heads something meant to bring sense into the news channels.
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Unquenchable thirst - Economist
The scarcity of water in South Asia will become harder to manage as demand rises. South Asia’s population of 1.5 billion is growing by 1.7% a year, says the World Bank, which means an extra 25m or so mouths to water and feed: imagine dropping North Korea’s entire population on the region each year. Greater wealth in South Asia brings with it a soaring demand for food, especially for water-intensive meat and other protein. Industry and energy-producers also use water, though unlike farms they return it, eventually, to the rivers.
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Watt-ever it takes, let’s do it - Sunil Jain, Financial Express
Radiation, you’ll remember from Physics 101, Rohan Parikh, Infosys’ Head of Green Initiatives, tells me as we shift from the bench outside Building 10 at Infosys’ Mysore campus to the wall around the neighbouring fountain, is the most efficient way to transfer heat, and convection the least efficient. And yet, he grimaces, we continue to use convection for heat transfers.
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Heavier, more lethal Arjun tank poised for trials - Ajai Shukla, Business Standard
A heavier, more protected Arjun tank, called the Arjun Mark II, is poised for army trials. Scheduled for January and June 2012, successful trials would be the green signal for building 124 Arjun Mark IIs at the Heavy Vehicles Factory in Avadi, outside Chennai. These will supplement the 124 Arjuns Mark I already in frontline service. Preparing the new Arjun for trials is the Central Vehicle R&D Establishment (CVRDE), Avadi, which steered the Arjun through a difficult and delayed development process; to its emergence as India’s premier main battle tank (MBT).
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India: The world's secret Silicon Valley - Nirmalya Kumar & Phanish Puranam, Atlantic
For many firms, developing new products for consumers around the world is the most visible manifestation of innovation - the "real deal." But many people still see India as a place where other people's ideas are made or executed and not where innovation begins. (After all, you don't hear about an Indian equivalent to Google, iPod or Viagra.) Bu they're wrong. In more than 600 captive research and development (R&D) centers across India today, corporations are designing and building amazing new things.
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History proving a touchy subject in Britain - DD Guttenplan, New York Times
As the novelist George Orwell observed, he who controls the past controls the future, so it is perhaps not surprising that Orwell’s home country is the latest setting for a battle over what history is and how it is taught. In recent weeks, two conferences here have seen the polite tones of academic debate shattered as historians traded accusations of racism, dumbing down and just plain ignorance.
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Behind biggest I-T seizure, a case of multiplying crores - Manoj Prasad, Indian Express
The biggest ever seizure in an income- tax raid, amounting to Rs 70.76 crore, is made in Dhanbad. An account is hacked and Rs 21 crore sought to be transferred online to a branch in Muzaffarpur. An account is frozen after a deposit of Rs 29 crore is made in Ghaziabad. Three incidents, on different days, in three different cities, with one thing in common — all involve Bharat Coking Coal Ltd.
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Building business on India’s strict labour laws - New York Times
India is known the world over as a prime innovator of outsourcing for foreign companies, which take advantage of its cheap, English-speaking labour force. Less well known is the extent to which Indian companies outsource their own jobs within their own country. The practice highlights a fundamental tension between India’s socialist past and a new, freewheeling private sector that is increasingly powering the economy while chafing at what many companies say are laws so protective of workers that they blunt hiring and stifle growth.
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Bollywood's Godfather - Priyanka Pereira, Indian Express
Evergreen' wasn't just a starry moniker for Dev Anand. Besides acting, directing and producing films till his last days, he introduced many new faces to the industry. A “debut” would get hefty gravitas when Dev saab backed one. His vision for what would later become the booming Bollywood was expansion through numbers. “I am glad the audience accepted me as an actor. Ever since, it has been my dream to get as many new faces as possible so that even they get a chance to express their talent,” he had said in an interview to The Indian Express in August 2010.
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FDI in practice - Amrita Chaudhry, Indian Express
The Opposition protests and the Congress’s and its allies’ own contradictions may force the government to put the plan for 51 per cent FDI in multi-brand retail on hold. The Indian Express looks at four examples of FDI entering the market as cash-and-carry wholesalers (in which 100 per cent FDI is allowed), building a loyal clientele and winning over sceptics.
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How ‘Kolaveri Di’ went viral - Cordelia Jenkins, Surabhi Agarwal & Amritha Venketakrishnan, Mint
Last weekend, the viral video of the song, Why this Kolaveri Di?, reached two milestones that confirmed its arrival in the YouTube hall of fame. It reached 15 million views—the target that Ashok Parwani, the associate director at Sony Music, which promoted the song, set for it on 25 November. It also got its own “Hitler gets angry about...” video—an essential accolade for any Internet meme and also the first for any Indian music video.
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Our Cinderella must step out - Manoj Joshi, India Today
It has been called the "Last Chance Aircraft", and worse. Its designers and developers have been excoriated for endless delays. But the time has come to say it: In the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), India may finally have a winner. We say "may" because the "last mile" is often the most difficult one to cross. This requires first, an emphatic ownership of the step-child by its primary operator, the Indian Air Force(IAF), its chosen manufacturer, the Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) and its parent, the Ministry of Defence. Second, and most importantly, it needs a serious managerial boost so that the production of the aircraft- whose significant bugs have already been worked out-can be undertaken on a modern industrial scale.
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The Man who made Miss Fonseca famous - Pritish Nandy, Economic Times
When I walked into The Times of India for the first time, in the winter of 1982, to start my life in journalism, the first person I bumped into was Mario. I knew him by his popular comic-strip characters. The sexy and charmingly stupid Miss Rajni Nimbupani, the Bollywood heroine who ran around trees chased by an assortment of heroes, each more forgettable than the other.
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From Finland, an intriguing school-reform model - Jenny Anderson, New York Times
Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator and author, had a simple question for the high school seniors he was speaking to one morning last week in Manhattan: “Who here wants to be a teacher?” Out of a class of 15, two hands went up — one a little reluctantly. “In my country, that would be 25 percent of people,” Dr. Sahlberg said. “And,” he added, thrusting his hand in the air with enthusiasm, “it would be more like this.”
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The Facebook Resisters - Jenna Wortham, New York Times
Tyson Balcomb quit Facebook after a chance encounter on an elevator. He found himself standing next to a woman he had never met — yet through Facebook he knew what her older brother looked like, that she was from a tiny island off the coast of Washington and that she had recently visited the Space Needle in Seattle.
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God particle’s teasing time - GS Mudur, Telegraph Calcutta
Tantalising hints of a predicted but unseen subatomic particle, the last piece of an elegant theory of physics, have emerged for the first time through independent search experiments but uncertainty over what has been spotted persists. Physicists exploring the debris of more than 470 trillion proton-proton collisions using two particle detectors in a laboratory near Geneva have observed events that may be caused by the particle called the Higgs boson or God particle.
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Pakistani identity’s claim on Indian heritage - Amaar Ahmad, Pak Tea House
There is a vociferous debate surrounding Pakistan’s national identity. Let there be no doubt that there will not be a Pakistani today more patriotic than the founder of Pakistan – Muhammad Ali Jinnah. On the 11th August, 1947, Jinnah addressed the first Constituent Assembly of Pakistan as the man who had led and inspired the Pakistan Movement. In his historic address, he does not shy away from mentioning “India”, in relation to the “Pakistani Identity”. In fact, his entire speech hovers around the task of building the Pakistani Identity. In his speech, he mentions “India” at least 10 times, very deliberately, very positively and very unapologetically.
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A drop in the ground - Ahona Ghosh, Economic Times
This year, villages in Paithan district, neighbouring Aurangabad in Maharashtra, received 40% less rain than usual. Still, the farmers there did just fine. Some of them even did better, planting not one but two crops, and going beyond staples to start growing fruits like sweet lime and mango. Water is less of a worry now because of PepsiCo India. The beverage major is trying to make up for the water-guzzling tendencies of its Aurangabad plant through various initiatives to replenish the ground water in the region.
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‘Investors’ are realty’s mafia; that’s why prices can’t come down - Rajanya Bose, First Post
The real estate market in India is an ideal example of the subversion of demand-supply economics. Everyone knows the real demand for both residential and commercial real estate is currently low. Inventories are piling up with builders and not even half of new launches are being sold in major cities. But prices still remain stubbornly high. According to the makaan.com property index, prices have nationally dropped by around 1 percent last month, with cities like Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Hyderabad seeing bigger falls. But one needs to follow the trend for a longer period to figure out if there is going to be any meaningful price correction where demand materialises. In all probability, it won’t happen.
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Asanas abroad - Veenu Sandhu, Business Standard
Five years ago when 26-year-old R Sivanandam moved to China from Madurai, people would greet each other the way they do in any other place, with a “Hello, how are you?” Today, when people in China meet each other, they say, “How are you? Do you practise yoga?” Speaking from Nanjing, the yogacharya who married a Chinese yoga teacher, Yu Xim Mei, about three years ago and now has a year-old son, says China has emerged as one of the biggest destinations for yoga, and is thus a great source of demand for yoga teachers from India.
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The Truck stops here - Economic Times
The phrase trucking it out takes a completely selfruling meaning in India. Here's a case of a truck trip between Delhi and Mumbai that illustrates how. Though the study is dated by about a decade, little has changed by way of regulations and their implementation. ROUTE: STATED & REAL A truck moving from Delhi towards Mumbai encounters the first check post (sales tax) at the Haryana border. The sales tax check post inspects the consignment and respective forms and receipts. At this check post, the driver has to also declare whether any delivery is to be made within territorial boundaries of Haryana.
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It’s that time of the year again - Nandini Nair, Indian Express
Why do we like the last months of the year the best? The weather turns kinder, wardrobes grow bulky and fa-la-la-la buzzes through the air. It is the season of weddings and holidays, festivals and celebrations, of eating out and growing fat, of dressing up and being pleased. It allows us to prioritise home and family over office and work, and sometimes, that’s the excuse we need. Aeroplanes crisscross the globe, reuniting children with parents, husbands with wives, lovers with the lonely.
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The Nurse from Kerala - Nandini Nair, Indian Express
The Malayali nurse is a ubiquitous brand. Each Malayali nurse has his or her individual purpose and unique trajectory, but their countless tales create a picture of a people and a region. They leave Kerala in their early 20s, taking their state everywhere they go. They leave their home looking for better incomes, aspiring to improve the quality of life of both their natal and post-marriage home. Dr Sheba George, assistant professor at Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science, California, and author of When Women Come First, Gender and Class in Transnational Migration (2005), says, “The story of the Kerala nurse and her immigration is connected to another story about the transformation of women’s worth in Kerala.”
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Forgot your password? - Somini Sengupta, Hindu
Passwords are a pain to remember. What if a quick wiggle of five fingers on a screen could log you in instead? Or speaking a simple phrase? Neither idea is far-fetched. Computer scientists in New York are training their iPads to recognise their owners by the touch of their fingers as they make a caressing gesture. Banks are already using software that recognises your voice, supplementing the standard PIN.
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Difference with mutual respect: A new kind of Hindu-Christian dialogue - Rajiv Malhotra, Huffington Post
Given the west's immense power over others in recent centuries, the framing of world religions' discourse, including the terminology, categories and hermeneutics, has been done using western religious criteria combined with subsequent western Enlightenment theories. In my book, I refer to this as "Western Universalism" and feel that this artificial view of non-western faiths has been assumed as the "standard" space in which all traditions must see themselves, leading to difference anxieties, and hence to the pressure to pretend sameness.
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Bon voyage, Metro Man - Rakesh Ranjan, Pioneer
An eminent civil engineer, efficient administrator and firm believer — these are facets of the personality of Elattuvalapil Sreedharan clearly visible in the functioning of Delhi Metro. Punctuality, integrity, technical competence and customer satisfaction form the basics of the work culture he evolved in DMRC ever since its inception 14 years ago. His full faith in his team to carry forward Delhi Metro’s sterling tradition also makes him a favourite of the 7,000 employees whom he has always credited for scripting the success saga.
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A time to tune out - Roger Cohen, New York Times
Let’s hear it for Volkswagen at the start of 2012. The German automaker has responded to demands from its works council by agreeing to stop the e-mail server to its BlackBerry-using employees a half-hour after their shift ends, only restoring it 30 minutes before work begins the next day. The agreement for now only affects about 1,150 of Volkswagen’s more than 190,000 workers in Germany, but it’s a start in encouraging employees to switch off, curb the twitchy reflex to check e-mail every couple of minutes, and take a look out at things — like family and the big wide world — without the distraction of a blinking red light.
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Corruption, Lokpal and the IAS brotherhood - Kingshuk Nag, Times of India
What sort of signal does the public get when the accused No. 1 in a major case of corruption continues to function as the principal secretary, department of home? But as I said this is a case of a government of IAS officers, by IAS officers and for IAS officers. This is the biggest brotherhood in the country but yet the Lokpal Bill thrust by Anna Hazare and acquiesced in by the Union government concentrates more on bringing in the 55 lakh Group C and D employees under the ambit of the proposed ombudsman.
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Ahead of Budget, babus unwind with Chitrangada - Pradeep Thakur, Times of India
Amid the general gloom over slowing growth, 70 senior babus of the finance ministry have gone on a three-day, two-night retreat, where they will unwind in the company of Bollywood stars Chitrangada Singh and Javed Akhtar while brainstorming on the economy. The retreat began on Friday with the mandarins moving to The Kingdom of Dreams, a live entertainment and leisure destination in Gurgaon. Post-dinner, the group was scheduled to proceed to a five-star resort in the Aravalis where discussions will be held on the theme, 'India 2020'.
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The Counterfeit Capital - Madhuparna Das, Indian Express
Churiantpur’s geography has shaped its destiny. The biggest village on the zero line in Malda district of West Bengal, it is a conduit for smuggling of fake Indian currency notes, or FICN, from Bangladesh into India. It is home to at least 20 syndicates. It’s made of two neighbourhoods, Mohabbatpur and Dui Sata Bighi, and half of its residents live across the fence, on the Bangladesh side.
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Tatas' unlikely golden goose - Vidya Ram, Business Line
Alongside his warning last week that Tata Group expansion plans would have to be tempered by the troubled global environment, Mr Ratan Tata noted that in its drive to take heed of risks, it shouldn't lose out on good opportunities. Four years ago, the “good” opportunity that the company didn't pass up provoked much tut-tutting. When Tata Motors first took Jaguar Land Rover off Ford's hands for $2.3 billion in 2008, many asked: how could a company known for commercial vehicles and cheap cars, and for whom there were no obvious synergies in the acquisition, do any better than a gargantuan of the global auto world, which had pumped billions into the iconic brand?
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The only Indian temple built by an Englishman - Sangram K Parhi, ExpressBuzz
The British ruled India for hundreds of years, and built many churches and cathedrals. But in the 1880s, a Shiva temple in Agar Malwa, Madhya Pradesh, was rebuilt by Lt Col Martin — the only temple ever made by an Englishman in India. Col Martin was in the Afghan wars. He used to regularly write to his wife, informing her of conditions there. It was a long war, and gradually the colonel’s letters stopped. Mrs Martin, who then lived in the cantonment of Agar Malwa, was besides herself with grief, fearing the worst.
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Asia puts the sparkle back in diamonds - Vinay Umarji & Kalpesh Damor, Business Standard
Crowding the busy Mini Bazaar street on the Varachha road in Surat, small time diamond traders have a new topic to gossip about—the Land of the Dragon. The hot news centres around the 12 or so Indian diamond traders who were arrested and then recently released from a detention centre in Shenzhen, China. Yet, instead of becoming enraged about the incarceration of their brethren or being deterred from visiting China, these traders are actually trying to figure out how to do business with the country.
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The rise of atheism in Pakistan - Ghaffar Hussain, TheCommentator
An increasing number of young Pakistani’s are adopting Atheism and openly questioning the existence of a God. Many analysts have attributed this trend to the rise of Islamist militancy in Pakistan as well as access to social media and other technological tools that allow people to share and explore new ideas. A Facebook group called ‘Pakistani Atheists and Agnostics’ was launched a few months ago and has already attracted over 800 members. I caught up with the founder of this group, a young Pakistani Technologist operating under the pseudonym ‘Hazrat Nakhuda’, in order to discuss this new phenomenon.
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A different kind of Hindu-Christian dialogue: Difference with mutual respect - Rajiv Malhotra, State of Formation
For over a decade, I have used interfaith exchanges as opportunities to introduce the concept of mutual respect and why it is superior to the patronizing notion of "tolerance" that is typically celebrated at such events. BEING DIFFERENT (Harpercollins, 2011), is entirely about appreciating how traditions differ from one another rather than seeing them as the same. In parallel with these works, I have been in conversations and debates with numerous thinkers of traditions other than my own.
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Bikers for warriors - Manimugdha S Sharma, Times of India
To Panipat - that was the route to begin with. So, on January 3, a group of youngsters left Pune on a historical journey. Their destination was the famous battlefield of Haryana. Saddled on motorcycles, these 550 individuals, 34 of them women, roared past the Western Ghats, the Narmada, and the Chambal ravines on their way to Panipat. To call it an adventure trip would have been a travesty of the emotion they were trying to articulate -it was their bid to relive the journey undertaken by their ancestors 252 years ago.
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BCCI: Billionaires Control Cricket in India - P Sainath, Hindu
BCCI presides over both private (IPL) and national cricket. It enables huge moneys to be made by one. And strangles the golden goose that is the other. The problem is not that our ‘boys' have been playing too much cricket. It's that they haven't been playing cricket. They've been playing IPL T20, where focus, concentration, technique and staying power count for little. And it's showing.
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The Garbage King - Venkatesha Babu, Business World
“Each time I would step out of the house or go to a hospital, I would see mounds of garbage. If at all it was cleared, it was just hauled away and dumped on the outskirts. Given that I had some engineering expertise, I wondered if there was a better and more environment-friendly way of handling the waste even while making it a viable business. Thus was born Ramky’s environmental engineering business,” says Alla Ayodhya Rami Reddy, chairman of the Ramky Group of companies.
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Clueless bankers harassing customers - Vandana Vasudevan, Mint
My mother and I are joint operators (with a so-called either-or mandate) of a locker in SBI’s main branch in Delhi for nearly two decades. When I went to operate the locker last month, I faced a surly man in his mid 50s called N.C. Chawla, who was the newly appointed manager of the locker section. He berated me about the V in my name being different (an imperceptible difference, if at all) from the way I had signed 15 years ago.
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Two Approaches: Dual & Non-dual - Melita Maschmann, Times of India
With me i had a letter from Germany. A Catholic friend of mine had made some points in it, and i wanted to give her an apt reply from the viewpoint of Hinduism. The first principle of Hinduism, she had written, is monistic pantheism, whereas Jewish-Christian thinking considers that God and Creation are two entities. "This difference appears to me to be absolute. Whether besides the existence of God, there is another existence, created by Him, but a real existence of a different sort, or whether everything beside the deity is only illusion." It could not be said that monistic pantheism and the Christian viewpoint are (both) correct.
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Rich America, poor America - Niall Ferguson, Daily Beast
There are “two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws…THE RICH AND THE POOR.” The British novelist (and later prime minister) Benjamin Disraeli wrote those words about England in 1845. But they could equally well apply to the United States in 2012.
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How the US lost out on iPhone work - Charles Duhigg & Keith Bradsher, NYT
When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president. But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States? Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked. Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
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She doesn’t know anything about art. And she won’t tell you what she likes - Nisha Susan, Tehelka
At the 2011 Art Summit, when photographer Ram Rahman introduced Ebrahim Alkazi to Neha Kirpal, the 86-year-old collector made a production of falling at Neha’s feet. Other people may express their admiration in more restrained ways, but Kirpal is one of the most well-liked people in the Indian art world. What makes it rather extraordinary is that she says (without any trace of defensiveness or inverted snobbery) to anyone who asks that she knows nothing about art. But this 30-year-old has been responsible for the single biggest shot of energy that the Indian art world has ever received.
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Lining up to pawn the family gold - Shaju Philip, Milind Ghatwai & George Mathew, Indian Express
Ashok Vishwakarma, a government employee in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh, needed Rs 25,000 for an emergency at home. Banks would have asked for a variety of documents, so he rushed to a Muthoot Finance branch. He kept some gold jewellery as security and took home Rs 25,000 in 15 minutes. “I didn’t want to run after banks for a personal loan,’’ the 52-year-old says. On January 5, he repaid the principal to take back the jewellery.
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So you were afraid of Global Warming - Madhavankutty Pillai, Open
Last October, Mumbai University’s Centre for Extra Mural Studies organised a day-long ‘International Conference on Climate Change: Shifting Science and Changing Policy’. As against the popular belief that global warming is a settled subject, they approached it critically. One of the speakers was RH Kripalani, a former head of climate research at the APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) Climate Centre in Busan, South Korea. Kripalani’s presentation was short. He had been studying the monsoon for over four decades and talked about whether global warming would have any impact on rains in India. It had been the subject of a paper of his, according to which monsoon rainfall will actually increase in India if man continues to pump carbon dioxide into the air.
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For the rich, investing in hotels reaps intangible gains - Vikram Doctor, Times of India
One of the first questions tackled by Charles Allen and Sharada Dwivedi in The Taj at Apollo Bunder, their weighty new history of the hotel, is why JN Tata built it at all. They note the popular story of it being built to avenge the insult of being turned away from a Europeans-only hotel, but point out that while this may well have happened, "it seems far too petty a reason to fire a man of the caliber of JN Tata, who in the past had not hesitated to cross swords with governments and powerful commercial concerns".
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The new Wordsmiths - Dipti Nagpaul-D'Souza, Indian Express
Seated in her dubbing studio in Andheri, Ghosh is in charge of re-creating this 2012 epic sci-fi film in Hindi for the theatrical release in India on March 9. The 62-year-old’s company Sound & Vision India handles film dubbing for various Hollywood production houses, including Paramount, Universal and Sony Pictures. And given the increase in the number of Hollywood films that release in India, there is a definite boom in the industry.
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Why Sachin shouldn’t get the Bharat Ratna - Aakar Patel, Mint
The Bharat Ratna is an award our leaders give one another. Twenty-three of our 41 Bharat Ratnas are Indian politicians. It isn’t easy to think of Gulzarilal Nanda’s mighty achievements or for that matter Rajiv Gandhi’s. Norman Borlaug, who saved India from starvation, didn’t get the Bharat Ratna. Even so, many deserving people got it. Amartya Sen, J.R.D. Tata, Nelson Mandela, B.R. Ambedkar, Mother Teresa. His fans now want Sachin Tendulkar on this list.
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Vivekananda’s Lankan connection - Priyadarshi Dutta, Pioneer
Vivekananda’s exploits in Sri Lanka is a little known chapter. En route India, he plodded through the island for 10 days between January 15 and January 25, 1897. He came there on the invitation of Tamil Hindus who had keenly followed his great feat in the West. Tamils were in midst of a ‘Hindu Renaissance’ initiated by the Saivite reformer of Jaffna, Arumuga Navalar (1822-1879), and Vivekananda’s visit gave it a big push in that direction.
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Medical gluttony: How doctors do harm - Otis Brawley, CNN
The American health care system is fundamentally flawed and encourages inappropriate behavior and a subtle form of corruption. There truly is a combination of greed, ignorance and apathy within health care that is a cancer on this country. There is nothing wrong with medicine as a business, and nothing wrong with making an honest profit. However, in some cases, greed needs to be replaced with public interest, a concern for the national good.
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The everyday embrace of inequality - Raka Ray, Hindu
The big winner at the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday night was The Help, a film about the relationship between African American maids and their employers in 1960s Mississippi. The film, and the book on which it is based, is well-meaning, but both patronising and sentimental. Critics see it as a nostalgic feel good experience (“we were so racist then but we are so much more evolved now”) for contemporary white Americans, while ignoring the inequality between employers and domestic workers in the U.S. today.
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Marwari businessmen of Kolkata are a worried lot - Ishita Ayan Dutt, Business Standard
Around a thousand people had gathered at Shibpur, south of Kolkata, on an October morning to take part in the Shri Mahaluxmi Mahayajna being conducted by Swami Prakharji Maharaj of Haridwar. He was assisted by at least another hundred pandits, while 500 men, drawn from 15 states, chanted sacred hymns. Those in attendance were praying for industry to return to West Bengal. It had been organised by the Marwaris of the city — Rajasthani businessmen who have been around for almost two centuries.
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The power of tribes - Economist
Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the old, neat division between East and West, people have been inventing new ways of dividing up the world. In the 1990s it was fashionable to talk about America, Europe and Japan. Today pundits draw the line between emerged and the emerging markets. Joel Kotkin, a geographer, suggests another frame of reference. In “The New World Order”, a paper for the Legatum Institute, a think-tank in London, he looks at the world through the prism of culture.
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The talking thali - Devdutt Pattanaik
The best way to destroy a culture is to destroy the kitchen. For it is in the kitchen that a language is spoken that addresses the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue and even the skin, all five senses, something that all of us are exposed to since childhood but few of us realize. By cooking Chinese food in the Chinese way,the Chinese mother makes her child Chinese. By cooking Zulu food in the Zulu way, the Zulu mother makes her child Zulu.
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Dickens made masterpieces out of modern cruelties - Simon Schama, DailyBeast
Two hundred years on from his birth, how close is Charles Dickens to you? Do Pip and Peggotty, Carton and Copperfield, Pumblechook, Squeers, and Creakle have a place in your mind? Do you need Dickens as you need food and drink? I should hope so. God knows, the cruelties and iniquities Dickens devoted himself to savaging with unsparing antic fury are still with us today, and not embalmed behind some vitrine of Victoriana.
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The coming retail boom - Economic Times
Europe’s greatest achievement is supposed to be its single market. But actually taking advantage of that market can be frustrating. Retailing is a mess of restrictive practices and cultural oddities. Continental Europe boasts plenty of charming boulangeries and confiterías. But charm costs time and money. You may have to visit six or seven shops to fill your shopping bag—and one or two will inevitably be closed.
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Born educator - Thusitha de Silva, China Daily
Dipak C. Jain says he spends more time in air than on ground, jokingly referring to the United Airlines and American Airlines as being his home. His travels are making him feel more and more like a global citizen, which resonates well with his job. Jain is the dean of INSEAD (Institut Europeen d’Administration des Affaires)...
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Scourge, sheriff & enforcer - Sujeet Rajan, Economic Times
Preetinder S Bharara, 43, US attorney for the Southern District of New York, made history last week when he became the first Indian-origin person residing outside the shores of India to be featured on the cover of Time magazine. For Bharara, who was born in Ferozepur in Punjab...
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The royal food boom - Anil Mulchandani, ExpressBuzz
The story of Indian food is also the story of Indian royal cuisine, how conquering armies and traders brought along ingredients and influences that manifested themselves in royal recipes. “There is no greater chef than time,” says Das Sreedharan, widely credited as the man who took authentic Kerala cuisine to England.
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Tsering Woeser: Fearless reporting behind China’s great firewall - Joshua Barnes, Sampsonia Way
On December 17, 2007 Woeser was awarded the Norwegian Authors’ Union Freedom of Expression Award for “bravely choosing to publish her books, despite content deemed controversial by the Chinese authorities.” She was unable to attend the award ceremony in Oslo...
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Saffron Senoritas lead TV charge - Suman K Jha, ExpressBuzz
Smriti Irani leads the pack. The BJP Mahila Morcha (women’s wing) President and the youngest-ever woman member of Rajya Sabha is already a pro when it comes to television debates. She is, incidentally, also a much-in-demand “star campaigner” for the party.
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Married to the Gandhis: The unbearable burden of being Robert Vadra - Lakshmi Chaudhry, Firstpost
It’s a thankless job but somebody’s got to do it – wed and bed the Nehru/Gandhis, that is. “I gave up my life for Priyanka, fighting every day to not be a celebrity,” declares the nation’s First Son-in-law in his latest media outing. It’s been difficult, indeed.
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Frits Staal, an influential Indologist, passes away - K Santhosh, Hindu
Some of the earliest and rarest recordings of Veda recitation and chant were made by a foreigner, Frits Staal, during a ride he undertook across south India on an old Royal Enfield.
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In the write business - Rrishi Raote, Business Standard
The Khattars moved from Dera Ismail Khan in the North-West Frontier Province to Delhi after Partition. Like many other dispossessed families, they got on with life. Young Jagdish acted in a film called Gandhi Path.
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How Kodak succumbed to the digital age - Ullrich Fichtner, Spiegel
The most important moments of the 20th century were captured on Kodak film. But the once-dominant American company could not compete in the digital age. Eastman Kodak's bankruptcy has left the company's remaining employees with uncertain futures.
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And the Oscar comes from … - Hal Weitzman, Indian Express
RS Owens plays a central role in one of the glitziest nights in the American calendar: the Oscars. Those 13.5in gold statues — that every film star dreams of brandishing while delivering a homily to less-successful fellow nominees, colleagues, parents or God...
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Living up to a name - Aakar Patel, Mint
In Gujarati, the Tata logo is spelled with a soft T, like the one we use in tara, though we say Tata with the hard T. Which is correct? The truth is that Tata is actually misspoken now. The name was modified to make it Anglicized, though the Gujarati spelling was retained because it was original.
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Allah on prime time - Aakar Patel, Mint
The top four channels watched in Pakistan are Star Plus, Geo News, Sony and Colors. Of these, Star Plus has over three times the viewership of Geo News. Pakistanis get their news from local channels but their entertainment from Indian channels. This is so because it is not possible to produce entertainment in a moral society.
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When the dead speak - AND Haksar, Hindustan Times
Delhi is a city of many memories. A grim one belonging to the last category falls on March 22. On that date, over two centuries ago, the national capital witnessed a human carnage of unparalleled intensity and scale. This was the notorious qatle-aam of Delhi...
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Germany charges ahead in solar power - Mohan Murti, Business Line
The Suryashtakam is an eight-verse Octet, extolling Surya or the Sun God. While Indians chant the mantra, Germans are building solar panels on their rooftops, dominating the world stage as the leader in solar technology and, accounting for half the world's megawattage of solar power.
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Test cricket too hard for Indians... can only make money in 20-20: Greg Chappell - Aditya Iyer, Indian Express
The culture of India is such that, if you put your head above the parapet someone will shoot it. Knock your head off. So they learn to keep their head down and not take responsibility. The Poms (the British) taught them really well to keep their head down.
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Savile Row's India connection - T. Krithika Reddy, Hindu
Michael Jackson wore them. Richard Gere loves them. The inside story on how Chennai boys, Mahesh and Suresh Ramakrishnan, have become the go-to guys for bespoke suits — sought after by Italian Counts, American aristocrats, soccer stars, Hollywood celebrities and Mumbai millionaires.
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Don vivant - Swapan Dasgupta, Business Standard
To understand history, E H Carr had advised in his celebrated Trevelyan lectures in 1961, it helps to also understand the historian. Over the past five years or so, the publishing world has witnessed a relatively new phenomenon: historians writing about themselves, and biographies of historians.
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Bun maska at Kyani - Krishnaraj Iyengar, Hindu
This second generation torchbearer of Mumbai's famous Kyani & Co. Iranian restaurant is a man of many stories right from the days of the Raj to Raj Kapoor's unforgettable visits to place during his heydays. As we unwind over the most irresistible chai (tea), we delve into the enchanting world of eclectic...
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Pass the Books. Hold the oil - Thomas L Friedman, NYT
Every so often someone asks me: “What’s your favorite country, other than your own?” I’ve always had the same answer: Taiwan. “Taiwan? Why Taiwan?” people ask. Very simple: Because Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea with no natural resources to live off of — it even has to import sand and gravel from China...
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Forgotten: The man who won us Tawang - Sidharth Mishra, Pioneer
In 1951, Major Bob Khathing commanded a force of 200 soldiers and re-established India’s sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh, much to the annoyance of Jawaharlal Nehru. Sixty-four years after Independence, it seems we have consigned to the dustbin of history some of our freedom fighters...
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Cricket pads up for a fight with other sports - Nandini Raghavendra & Ravi Teja Sharma, Economic Times
The cricket debacle Down Under notwithstanding, the countdown to the fifth edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) has begun. With less than a month to go, the nine teams have started padding up for nets. Yet, what has been building...
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It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's a Nano Quad! - Vijay Kumar, Economic Times
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, have been featured in the popular press. Even though UAVs are unmanned, they are not autonomous. They are remotely piloted, often by a flight crew consisting of pilots, operators of sensors and mission coordinators.
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Sonia Gandhi among world's richest politicians - World Luxury Guide
| Name |
Country |
Wealth |
| Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz |
Saudi Arabia |
$21 billion |
| Hassanal Bolkiah |
Brunei |
$20 billion |
| Michael Bloomberg
|
USA |
$18.1 billion |
| Sonia Gandhi |
India |
$2-19 billion |
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The gangrapes of Gurgaon - Srijana Mitra Das, Times of India
The incident - a young woman travelling from suburban Gurgaon to Delhi via taxi with her brother after work, dragged out of the car by seven men, abducted, gang-raped - is disturbing enough. But what lies under is worse. This episode is one in a long line now, highlighting urgencies that are making India writhe - with no pleasure, only pain. The incident shines a harsh light upon the jagged...
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In India’s northeast, peace and foreign ties quietly spread - Samrat, NYT
Suddenly, there’s a flurry of activity between Northeast India and Myanmar, as barriers have started to lift. On Feb. 22, largely unnoticed by the news media, India’s foreign minister met with Myanmar’s construction minister in Delhi. The two spoke about starting a bus service between Imphal, in India, and Mandalay, in Myanmar, increasing the number of flights...
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Mistry to Tata - Rohit Bansal, Pioneer
What struck me was the finesse with which in a ribbon-cutting for a classroom donated by the Tatas, Mistry was afforded a poignant insight via a Harvard Business School (HBS) case. With Mistry, Ratan Tata, Ravi Kant, RK Krishna Kumar, Ravi Dubey, Ray Bickson and other leading Tata lights in the classroom, case writer Prof Rohit Deshpande placed the central conundrum: Why in the 26/11 terror attacks...
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Why bilinguals are smarter - Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, NYT
Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving...
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Slow life, anybody? - Thomas T Abraham, Economic Times
The historic Palazzo del Gusto in the hill town of Orvieto near Rome is an apt setting for the international headquarters of Cittaslow International, and its director, Pier Giorgio Oliveti, seems the right messiah for the cause. Cittaslow, meaning slow city, is the antithesis of the fast culture increasingly pervading modern life. It is a counter philosophy, expressed through a different lifestyle and attitude to life.
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He was showing an Orissa not many saw before - Debabrata Mohanty, Indian Express
If you want to know a different India from the Taj Mahal, far, very far from the crowds of tourists. If you are able to approach a tribal armed with arrows and bow, without at once wanting to take a photograph. Well then come with us in Orissa!!! This is how Paulo Bosusco, the 55-year-old adventurous Italian with a flowing golden mane, used to draw eager tourists...
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The changing face of ‘The Hindu’ - Anupama Chandrasekaran, Mint
Mount Road in Chennai isn’t a battlefield but the 46-year-old Varadarajan does have a scrap on his hands in his latest role. As The Hindu’s first editorial head in almost 50 years who isn’t a member of the family that owns the newspaper group, Varadarajan is leading the fight to regain territory that has been yielded to The Times of India in its own backyard. The editor has tried to put his stamp on the paper...
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A changing innovation landscape - John Flannery, Mint
At a time when the global economy continues to be in a state of flux and the emerging economies are also beginning to feel the impact of this uncertainty, my mind races to the proverbial thought of viewing the glass as half empty or half full. I choose the latter. What reinforce my belief in India’s long-term growth potential are not just its strong economic fundamentals, but also the range of innovation...
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America's Indian summer - Vibhuti Patel, Hindu
This has been a year to celebrate, the year of India in American museums. Four near-simultaneous, groundbreaking shows of spectacular Indian art opened in major U.S. art institutions — three in the fall and the fourth, centred on Delhi, just last month. In September, New York's Metropolitan Museum inaugurated “Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India, 1100-1900”, with 220 paintings by 40 diverse artists...
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Lost spring in Lahore - Raza Rumi, Indian Express
Lahore, a centre for the arts and learning in the early 20th century, has been the custodian of a plural, vibrant culture for decades. Its walled city, unlike several other old settlements, has continued to survive despite the expansion of the city. So have its peculiar features: its dialects, cuisine, community linkages and, of course, rich festivals such as Basant. As the capital of Punjab...
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In Patna, a low-cost private school revolution - Prashant K Nanda, Mint
The government may not agree but a low-cost and affordable private school revolution seems to be taking shape in Patna, although a bulk of it involves institutions that are not recognised by the government. A study by education think-tank India Institute and the UK’s Newcastle University found 1,574 schools in Bihar’s capital city. Of these, 21% were government...
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New and updated - Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Indian Express
An earlier column (‘A Dictionary for Our Times’, January 27, 2011) had argued that Indian politics defies all traditional definitions. The economic, political and social revolution of our time requires reinterpreting old vocabularies of government; our language is breaking under the weight of innovation. Over the last couple of years the conceptual revolution has only deepened.
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Punjabi by choice: How trucks are changing our taste - Yamini Dhall, Economic Times
The highway is empty save the odd truck hooting past. A few trucks idle at the kerb while the drivers relax on the coir charpoys at 'Kake da Asli Panjabi Dhaba'. Under the smoke-blackened ceiling, waiters whoosh past plastic chairs, a bubbling patila and the hot tandoor, offering everyone a glimpse of the worn-out menu card that's in crude hand-painted Gurumukhi.
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App millionaires from the other India - Radhika P Nair, Economic Times
Mobile application entrepreneur Virat Khutal, founder of Twist Mobile, is just back from a trip to Vietnam, where he was scouting for office locations to set up a development centre. When ready in mid-2012, it will be the first remote development centre set up by an Indian mobile app company. Such global ambitions now define a growing swathe of start-ups...
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Why is it better to live in the South - Aakar Patel, Mint
Prefer south India to north India. I also prefer south Indians to north Indians. I wish Mehmood had defeated Kishore Kumar in Padosan’s singing contest. The audience thinks Kishore’s Vidyapati trounces Mehmood’s Master Pillai. But Vidyapati is on home ground singing in Khamaj to a tabla playing Keherva and Teen Taal. Pillai is singing the other man’s music.
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Robert Redford to produce a documentary about Watergate - Brian Stelter, NYT
Rarely does reality intersect with role playing the way it did two Sundays ago in Bob Woodward’s living room. Meeting him there were Carl Bernstein, his writing partner at The Washington Post during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s; Ben Bradlee, their top editor at the time; and Robert Redford, the actor who played Mr. Woodward in “All the President’s Men,”...
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The math behind the buyology - Karthik Krishnaswamy, Indian Express
When Michael Lewis wrote Moneyball, which described how a group of stats nerds revolutionised Major League Baseball, he couldn’t have imagined what he had set in motion. Twelve years after his book’s publication, It isn’t just Hollywood that has co-opted his work but Bollywood too. “On a lighter note,” said Shilpa Shetty of Rajasthan Royals fame, during a recent interview...
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Mobile wallet takes aim: Buck gets a bang - M Saraswathy, Neha Pandey & Katya B Naidu, Business Standard
Cash is the prime target, and credit card could take the next hit. Clearly, telecom operators are on a war footing — doubling their efforts to promote mobile wallet services, that allow subscribers to load money onto their mobile accounts, and spend at will. Bharti Airtel has been the first to offer this service...
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The bungalows that Mayawati rebuilt - Subhash Mishra, Express Buzz
Mayawati’s Dalit parks may have caught the public attention, but the four-time chief minister’s (CM) wasteful expenditures began from home, it now appears. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader spent no less than `40 crore of public money on the upgradation and renovation of her palatial bungalow at 13-A Mall Avenue in Lucknow in her last term between 2007 and 2012.
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Longing to return to a free land - Rahul Chandran, Mint
Ask Tenzin Chemi what her favourite Indian food is and she will say rava idli. Which is not unusual. After all, a lot of people in this part of the world like the steamed cakes made of broken wheat. Except that Chemi is a 22-year-old Tibetan whose grandfather Tashi Phuntsok and his family trekked more than 1,000km and sought refuge in India in 1959, a few months after Tibetan...
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Blues by the Arabian Sea - Naresh Fernandes, Hindu
Earlier this year, a stage in suburban Mumbai played host to a jazz-fusion concert headlining Niladri Kumar, a fifth-generation sitar player. The depth of Kumar's association with Hindustani classical music was satisfying, but it wasn't as surprising as the long family connection one of his sidemen had with jazz. Gino Banks, the drummer at the performancee...
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Blame the British Raj on bankers - Aakar Patel, Mint
This month, 350 years ago, an event occurred that changed India. In April 1662, England’s King Charles II took possession of Bombay, given to him as dowry. Though the Portuguese lied to him earlier and had promised everything up to Borivali, Charles II was given Bombay from Colaba to Mahim. I believe this event, more than any other, and the thinking of a small group...
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Road that may erase history and much more - TS Subramanian, Hindu
A 1,300-year old Siva temple, celebrated in the verses of Saivite saint Tirugnana Sambandar and boasting of inscriptions belonging to the Chola kings, is facing demolition by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI). The Tirupuravar Panankateesvarar temple is situated in Panaiyapuram village, 2 km from...
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Everyone has his own Everest to climb - Harsimran Julka, Economic Times
It's very lonely out there...almost like being on the moon," says Jamling Tenzing Norgay, 46, as if to dissuade you from any tall ambitions. He should know. Jamling is only the 10th in the Norgay family to ascend Mount Everest. But for Norgay Jr., a graduate in business management from Northland College, Wisconsin...
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Adapting to the Indian lifestyle - Cordelia Jenkins, Mint
Chandan Singh from Orchha in Madhya Pradesh and Sung Bae Kim from Seoul share an unlikely marriage. They met by chance in 1991, when Sung Bae came to India for a short tour with a delegation of 600 Korean students. At the time, Singh was studying Chinese at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU); he had a roommate from Korea and so knew a little about...
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An Escher print called India - Guy Pfefferman, Indian Express
After returning to India for a week for the first time since 2000, I set down on paper some impressions about what I thought had changed, and what not. Doing so is presumptuous beyond words, all the more because even to lifetime observers, India is a bit like an Escher print — any statement about India is as valid as is its opposite. J.R.D. Tata wrote famously in 1991...
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Small change, big deal - Kanika Datta, Business Standard
After this year’s Budget, the international and domestic business community has added the spectre of retrospective tax laws to the litany of complaints against India. The usual big-ticket suspects are uncertain policy, multiplicity of rules, corruption, lack of infrastructure and so on and so forth. But commercial life in India involves some other peculiarities that don’t get captured...
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Want my children to study at Yale: Shah Rukh Khan - Business Line
Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan says he had always wanted to study in an institution like Yale and hopes one day his children will come to study at the prestigious US university. Khan was visiting the Connecticut-based Ivy League institution yesterday as a Chubb fellow, one of the highest honours bestowed...
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The great Indian hope trick - Times of India
In the late 1800s, the story of a startling magic trick emerged from India and spread. In its fullblown version, the story describes a street performer who begins to play his flute over a coiled rope, which climbs dancing like a cobra to a great height. The boy assistant scrambles to the top of the rope and disappears. The magician calls for the boy, grows impatient...
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How tiny Estonia stepped out of USSR's shadow to become an internet titan - Patrick Kingsley, Guardian UK
In 1995, four years after Estonia broke free from the USSR, Toomas Hendrik Ilves read a "very Luddite" book by Jeremy Rifkin called The End of Work. "It argued that with greater computerisation there would be fewer jobs," remembered Ilves, then a senior diplomat, now the country's...
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Attend top US colleges at no charge - Times of India
Five prestigious US universities will create free online courses for students worldwide through a new, interactive education platform dubbed Coursera, the founders announced on Wednesday. The two founders, both professors of computer science at Stanford University, also announced that they had received...
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Battleground Annandale - Ashwani Sharma, Indian Express
A temporary sign at Shimla’s Annandale ground announces the suspension of golfing for the next few days. The presence of Army men, weapons and heavy equipment on the ground makes it clear why. They have assembled for a “mountain rescue and disaster management exercise”, a three-day mock drill planned almost immediately after a fresh...
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What's fair and unfair in ads? - R Srinivasan, Business Line
A recent advertisement for what is euphemistically called “intimate wash” product has managed to grab global attention, becoming a viral hit on the internet, while outraging feminists, infuriating social commentators and even reviving the debate on India's caste system and “colour” hang-up. While many writers have waxed wroth on the objectification...
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Abhishek Singhvi. And lessons from the third eye - Shoma Chaudhury, Tehelka
The third Eye has always been exalted in Hindu mythology as the domain of Shiva, the meditative one. A capacity for supranatural sight acquired after strenuous penance. A tool fit only for the initiated. In the 21st century, however, the Third Eye has been democratised. Technology has ensured everyone can now look beyond...
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The politics of Karnataka’s ‘mutts’ - Shamsheer Yousaf, Mint
Congress president Sonia Gandhi will visit Karnataka for the first time in three years later this week and media reports say that she is expected to participate in the birthday celebration of Shivakumara Swami, the head of the influential Sree Siddaganga Mutt in Tumkur. If that happens, it will only serve to highlight the importance of mutts (or monasteries)...
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Beneath our dancing feet - Justin Mccarthy, Business Line
Practicing Bharatanatyam in India today means negotiating a dance form with a sensitive past and a problematic present. It means addressing history and navigating identities of class and sexuality. Devadasis were hereditary female performers who for centuries practiced an earlier form of what we now call Bharatanatyam. They lived in South India in regions of modern-day...
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Country’s oldest manuscript out in brand new prints - Seema Chishti, Indian Express
The National Archives of India has published copies of what scholars have termed “indisputably the oldest manuscript in India”, the Buddhist Lotus Sutra, after months spent on a restoration of the original pages, inscribed in Brahmi on birch bark at some time in the fifth or sixth century.
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Schools of scandal, old and new - Sunil Sethi, Business Standard
Out, damn’d spot! out, I say!” cries Lady Macbeth as she stumbles about in her sleep but, as her co-conspirator knows, not all the ocean can wash off the stains. Like Banquo’s ghost, there are some murky stories that won’t go away. The Bofors gun deal is a classic political scandal that is back, a quarter of a century later, raising questions that were never answered...
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Edison's Revenge: The rise of DC power - Peter Fairley, Technology Review
In 1903, as a last-ditch effort to maintain direct current as the standard for distributing electricity around the United States, Thomas Edison presided over a notorious event meant in part to demonstrate the danger of alternating current: the electrocution of Topsy, a circus elephant deemed a threat to humans...
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Agraharam — time virtually stands still here - R Sujatha, Hindu
Stories about life in agraharam belong to the late 19th century and early 20th century. But behind the stories lies a simple parallel to today's lifestyle. In modern parlance, an agraharam would be the equivalent of a gated community. Traditionally, an agraharam was a cluster or row of houses that abutted the temple wall...
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Bachchan’s Bofors escape - Nistula Hebbar, Financial Express
In the resurrection of the ghost of Bofors, the only protagonist of that saga who got the opportunity to walk off unsullied into the great white light of absolution was legendary actor Amitabh Bachchan. A legend in his lifetime, for many of the new generation watching his press conference last week, terming the clean chit to him as “too little too late”...
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Keep the ties that bind us - Reshmi R Dasgupta, Economic Times
When my son was in high school, I caused him some minor embarrassment when I refused to send him for a trip along the upper Yamuna during his Dussehra holidays. In a rather long letter to his principal, I told him that Dussehra was Durga Puja for Bengalis and as such the only time that we as 'non-residents' got the opportunity to connect with and celebrate...
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A mouthful of controversies - Swapan Dasgupta, Asian Age
And what shall I say”, asked the Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, “of that weakest of human beings, the half-educated Anglicised and brutalised Bengali babu who congratulates himself on his capacity to dine off a plate of beef as if this act of gluttony constituted in itself unimpeachable evidence of a perfectly cultivated intellect?
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Why I gave up on 'Social Activism' - Yoginder Sikand, CounterCurrents
Protesting against 'social oppression' had truly become a profession for many, who turned into what are called 'professional social activists'. Negative news and developments were quickly seized upon by them to write about and demonstrate against, to pontificate about in seminars and to appear on TV to debate over and thereby worm their way into the public...
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The holy land - Rachel Dwyer, Mint
Winston Churchill claimed that “India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator.” While the second part of his statement has been proved wrong, it is unlikely he had any idea quite what the first part meant. While India is indeed a geographical term, it has a dual geography, a physical one, but also a sacred geography which dates...
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A tale of two towns - Akshat Kaushal, Business Standard
Driving up from Chandigarh, as the road curves around the Siswan dam, Kasauli, the colonial hill station, comes into view. Behind it and higher up rests the Raj’s summer capital, Shimla. Underneath these hills, white smoke rises from cluttered shoebox-like structures, randomly spread across the foothill. Here, between forest and hill, lies the industrial township...
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Cancel the subscription - Subbiah Arunachalam, Indian Express
Most of us spend a few hundred rupees a year on the magazines we buy for leisure reading or for keeping abreast of current affairs. But if you are a scientist, you may be shelling out a few thousand rupees for the journal your professional society publishes for its members. Of course, if you are a serious researcher, you may have to read or refer to many journals...
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The real war on women is in the Middle East - Mona Eltahawy, Foreign Policy
When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband "with good intentions" no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are "good intentions"? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is "not severe" or "directed at the face."
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China: The world's cleverest country? - Sean Coughlan, BBC
China's results in international education tests - which have never been published - are "remarkable", says Andreas Schleicher, responsible for the highly-influential Pisa tests. These tests, held every three years by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, measure pupils' skills in reading...
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Mammoth and magnificent Lepakshi - Chitra Ramaswamy, Business Line
A massive Basava (bull) in all grandeur, bedecked with bells, beads, lingams and yalis, greets us at the entrance to Lepakshi, a small town in Andhra Pradesh's Anantapur district, roughly 130 km from Bangalore. The colossal, monolithic Nandi (right), measuring 15 ft x 27 ft, is one of India's largest.
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Much before Vikram, Ram Samvat prevailed - Lokpal Sethi, Pioneer
For the past fortnight, scholars and saints from different parts of the country are descending at Bhawanta, an obscure village near Kuchaman in Naguar district. The purpose of their visit is to interact with 55-year-old Pandit Ghanshyam Sharma, who claims that his painstaking research on Lord Ram...
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The best cup of coffee? The one that's closest to hand in the morning - Ruchir Joshi, Mail Today
I grew up in a tea world. As kids growing up in Calcutta we drank Bournvita, Ovaltine, Horlicks and hot chocolate but grown-ups, (i.e everyone over fourteen), drank tea. The poor drank tea from khullads (earthen cups) - also called bhaands - while squatting on the road, the middle-class drank tea...
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Vignettes of past & present - Diana Ningthoujam, Financial Express
The origins of the Kalighat style of painting remain mostly obscure, though its demise has been well documented. Its downfall can be traced to the early part of the 20th century when cheap oleographs imitating them killed the hand-painted art form. It’s rather ironic then that the West, which brought about the fall of a once thriving industry, would be responsible for breathing...
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Come the college education revolution - Thomas L Friedman, NYT
Andrew Ng is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and he has a rather charming way of explaining how the new interactive online education company that he cofounded, Coursera, hopes to revolutionize higher education by allowing students from all over the world to not only hear his lectures, but to do homework...
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The global middle class Is bigger than we hought - Shimelse Ali, Uri Dadush, Foreign Policy
The swelling middle class in emerging economies is transforming the economic balance of power across the globe. Measuring it, however, is no easy task. There is no widely accepted definition of what constitutes the middle class, and the most common ways of measuring its growth through looking at rises in income..
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The house that Pratibha Patil could not build - R Vijayaraghavan, Mint
It could be called the next step in the evolution of journalism; or, to make it dramatic, the birth of “the digital bush telegraph”. It was a serendipitous development that makes journalism stronger, more effective and helps journalists quickly reach a large readership...
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New Pearl Garden - Business Standard
Lutyens’ Delhi – the beauteous heart of the capital city, with tree-lined boulevards and colonial bungalows – was built by rulers (the British) to set themselves apart from the ruled. Eighty years after the bungalows were built by Edwin Lutyens, after whom the area is named in official papers as the Lutyens Bungalow Zone or LBZ, they are crumbling edifices caught in a time warp...
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Reticent rich: Preferred style in Silicon Valley - Somini Sengupta, Business Standard
Wealth is here if you know where to find it. Fabulous home theaters are tucked into the basements of plain suburban houses. Bespoke jeans that start at $1,200 can be detected only by a tiny red logo on the button. The hand-painted Italian bicycles that flash across Silicon Valley on Saturday mornings have become the new Ferrari
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Chess in India: Why is it on the rise? - Rajini Vaidyanathan, BBC
The world chess championships are under way in Russia, where Vishwanathan Anand defends his title. His success is widely credited for the growing popularity of chess in his home country, India, the nation widely believed to have given the game to the world. He's been described by some as the Sachin Tendulkar of chess...
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Tight as corsets, fajas are a shortcut to curves - Sarah Maslin Nir, NYT
Blanca Murillo’s morning routine, for the most part, would seem unremarkable to any woman: she washes her face, brushes her teeth, runs a comb through her hair and daubs on makeup. Then, as she has for the past seven years, she tugs on her girdle. Known as a faja, from the Spanish word for wrap...
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Gujarat village that puts metros to shame - Bharat Yagnik, Times of India
Think of an Indian village and what comes to mind are images of mooing cows, open drains and children playing ants and frog games. But, Punsari, a motley village in Himmatnagar, talks about wi-fi and optical fiber broadband network, its children spend best of their times in air-conditioned classrooms with CCTV cameras.
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From cubicles, cry for quiet pierces office buzz - John tierney, NYT
The walls have come tumbling down in offices everywhere, but the cubicle dwellers keep putting up new ones. They barricade themselves behind file cabinets. They fortify their partitions with towers of books and papers. Or they follow an “evolving law of technology etiquette,” as articulated by Raj Udeshi at the open office he shares....
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A wealth of wallets - Economist
Turn left off the main reception to PayPal’s offices in San Jose, open a nondescript door and you step into a garish living room dominated by a flat-screen television. This is a laboratory for what PayPal calls “couch commerce”: people sit in front of the television buying things with their mobile phones or tablet computers. Next door is a make-believe...
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Victoria's Secret bras a boost for rural Indian women - Nita Bhalla, Reuters
Indian villager Jaya places the bright pink, sequined, molded C-cupped designer bra under the needle of her sewing machine and carefully stitches the seams together. The padded "Very Sexy" push-up bra which 22-year-old Jaya sews is for American lingerie retailer Victoria's Secret - designed to give a "boost" to buyers...
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Robotic fish to patrol for pollution in harbours - Rebecca Morelle, BBC
In the shallow waters of Gijon harbour, in northern Spain, a large, yellow fish cuts through the waves. But this swimmer stands apart from the marine life that usually inhabits this port: there's no flesh and blood here, just carbon fibre and metal. This is robo-fish - scientists' latest weapon in the war against pollution.
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Self-driving cars in California - Kathleen Miles, Huffington Post
The future has arrived. California state senators have voted 37-0 in support of a bill that would allow self-driving vehicles on California streets and highways as long as a licensed driver is aboard, CBS reports. Self-driving cars, which were pioneered by Google's autonomous Prius in 2010, are designed to be safer than human-driven vehicles.
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The language of the globalised world - Gwynne Dyer, Pioneer
The second President of the United States, John Adams, predicted in 1780 that “English will be the most respectable language in the world and the most universally read and spoken in the next century, if not before the end of this one.” It is destined “in the next and succeeding centuries to be more generally...
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Decoding the strands of life - Peerzada Abrar, Economic Times
A seven-year-old Japanese boy suffered from a neuromuscular disorder that impaired the functioning of his muscles. Since the age of two, he had trouble releasing his grip or in getting up from a sitting position, which rendered him immobile. Japanese doctors suspected that he was suffering from a rare genetic disorder characterised...
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Gabbar Singh in Gulmarg - Mir Ehsan, Indian Express
A craving for Bollywood in Kashmir has lead to indigenous remakes, digital recordings of songs and a profusion of indoor studios, which reproduce Bollywood classics with a regional flavour. Thakur yumi athe di mei (Thakur give me this hand),’’ says Gabbar in chaste Kashmiri. Gabbar and his famous team of Sholay are once again on the screen...
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The distilled capitalist - Aparna Piramal Raje, Mint
Rakesh Jhunjhunwala’s private office embodies the fabled stock-market investor’s dream. A corner room with an AstroTurf terrace garden, it overlooks a glimmering Arabian Sea. It is a peaceful sanctuary for quiet reflection, in contrast to the financial carnage which may be taking place on the five computer screens on his desk. Jhunjhunwala, particularly...
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It’s a cosy little club - Rajdeep Sardesai, Hindustan Times
Politicians are notorious for doublespeak, which is why their public positions are often dictated to by private agendas. So when a Lalu Prasad calls for a ban on the Indian Premier League (IPL), his strident posture masks the reality that his son was contracted with the Delhi Daredevils for five years, didn’t play a single match but pocketed a cool Rs. 1.5 crore.
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The game changer - Surajeet Das Gupta, Business Standard
A farmer in a remote village is undergoing an electrocardiogram test. A chip inside the machine connects it to a mobile phone tower, from where the signal is relayed through a fibre optic network to a team of doctors in Delhi who observe the data and read out their prognosis. You are an IPL buff and want to watch your favourite team in action.
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Freeze frame - Mail Today
It only took a second for Associated Press photographer Huynh Cong Ut to snap the iconic black-and-white image 40 years ago. It communicated the horrors of the Vietnam War in a way words could never describe, helping to end one of the most divisive wars in American history. But beneath the photo lies a lesser-known story. It's the tale of a dying child brought together...
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Menu is on the tablet - Priya Sheth, Business Line
You're sitting at a fine-dining restaurant, ravenously hungry and awaiting the menu card. The waiter presents you with a tablet. Confused? High-end restaurants are now catering to consumers' growing appetite with a digital offering. Menu cards are passé. Customers can now go through the menu on a fancy tablet and pick the items of their choice.
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Holy tresses for Holly divas - Alice Smellie & Sanjay Jha, Mail Today
Temple hair, as it is known, has already found its way to hundreds of British salons, where it is sold in the form of real hair extensions costing up to £3,000 a time. One leading manufacturer boasts that horde of celebrities, including Mischa Barton, Eva Longoria and Frankie Sandford of The Saturdays, have used its products. To fans of extensions, the appeal of human hair...
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Muslim girl aces in Sanskrit - Angel Grace Mary, Indian Express
It was not just that Anjala Beegum of DAV Higher Secondary School in Mogappair secured the first rank in the Class X examination, she also achieved the unusual distinction of a Muslim student topping the State in Sanskrit. With a whopping score of 497 on 500 and a centum in Sanskrit, Anjala Beegum in a way emulated her brother Gulsar Ahamed...
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Inside God’s Banker: A tale of money, mystery & monsignors - Philip Pullella & Silvia Aloisi, Reuters
For a financial institution whose ATMs offer Latin as a language option, whose offices are below the pope's windows and where tellers work under the gaze of crucifixes, one might assume the Vatican bank would have a dispensation from earthly travails. But new judicial woes and internal upheavals at the bank...
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Buried treasure - TE Narasimhan, Business Standard
It is a long, tiring journey to Kodumanal, a tiny village in western Tamil Nadu — a place virtually unheard of until archaeologists recently unearthed a 2,500-year-old industrial estate there. The trip from Chennai to this inland village happens in three stages: eight-hour bus ride to Erode (district headquarters), two-hour bus ride to Kangeyam...
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Why Pakistan’s Coke studio beats India’s hollow - Aakar Patel, FirstPost
Why did Pakistan produce the lovely Coke Studio music series and not India? Why is Pakistan’s Coke Studio more popular with many Indians over the new Indian version? Is it because Pakistan’s musicians are better or more creative than India’s? Let’s explore the question. My introduction to this sort of music came...
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Start-up city - Johnson TA, Indian Express
At No 13, a three-bedroom house in Sector IV in the south Bangalore suburb of HSR Layout, there is a start-up in every room. There is one in the hall and dining area too. The five companies in the house span the range of what is hot in the mobile and internet start-up space at present. Those sharing rent at the HSR Layout house over the last year are Amit Sharma...
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This Queen, that Empress - Ashok Malik, Pioneer
With the commemoration of the diamond jubilee of her coronation, Queen Elizabeth II has become only the second monarch in London to have reigned for 60 years. The first was, of course, Queen Victoria or “apro Victoria” as Parsis of a certain generation referred to her. After all, she was not just Queen of the United Kingdom but also Empress of India.
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The ghazal loses its voice - Rasheeda Bhagat, Business Line
A classical or typical ghazal is all about longing and belonging; of tears, heartbreak, pain and rejection… though not of the Kolaveri brand! But today the genre of the ghazal itself is weeping, for one of its rarest, most precious and most beloved soulmates. The voice of Mehdi Hassan, who took the ghazal to new classical heights, whose powerful and passionate...
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Water on tap, 24×7? Possible - Piyush Kumar Tiwari, Indian Express
Scorching heat and no water is the reality for much of India during the summer months. The national Capital Delhi runs short by 1,100 million litres of water per day during peak summer implying that each resident gets 70 litres less water per day. The story is far worse in neighbouring Gurgaon, the Millennium City that is host to numerous multinationals.
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Across the Niagara Falls on a tightrope - Hindu
A daredevil American, Nik Wallenda, became first person in the world to walk on a tightrope across the roaring Niagara Falls, separating U.S. and Canada. A high-wire artist Wallenda, 33, defied predictions of naysayers who warned him of everything from falcons to fierce winds toppling him as he braved heavy winds and heavy...
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Cooking a success story in Japan - Raju Gusain, Mail Today
Time was when at least one member from every family in Uttarakhand served in the Indian Army. Not anymore. Well-bodied young men from the hilly state are today trading the soldier's rifle and the olive green uniform for the chef's spatula and apron, choosing the kitchen over the bunker as their preferred workplace. Leading the pack of the growing number of youth moving...
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Imagining India: A sacred geography bound by Hinduism - Seema Sirohi, First Post
Can geography be imagined in the mind and enacted? By billions of feet trekking to sacred rivers and mountain tops over thousands of years? Diana Eck, an eminent scholar of Hinduism, says this is the real idea behind India or Bharat, a geography carried in the imagination over generations and one that lived much before invading...
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The enigma of Indian engineering - James Trevelyan, Hindu
My time in South Asia has rewarded me with an enigma: why is engineering so expensive here? Why is it often many times more expensive than in Australia, my home? My search for answers led me to shanty towns on the fringes of mega-cities. We compared an award winning Indian factory making car parts for Detroit and Stuttgart with a leading Australian factory...
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Indian Americans ahead of all other ethnic minorities in US - Yashwant Raj, Hindustan Times
Indian-Americans are richer and better educated than all other ethnic groups in the US but are least likely to marry out of the community, says a new study. And, as most other Asian-Americans they lean politically towards the Democratic Party, but unlike them take longer to give up their Indian citizenship.
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'Newddhists' seek balance - James Atlas, NYT
Why was I in a tent in northern Vermont? Much less a tent in the woods at a Buddhist meditation center, reading Sakyong Mipham’s “Turning the Mind Into an Ally” by the light from my smartphone? If you really want to hear about it (to borrow a phrase from Holden Caulfield), I was on retreat. Perhaps I should say, I was in retreat, from a frenetic Manhattan life...
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Lord's Jagannath yatra, from rest to motion - GS Tripathi, Times of India
The Rath Yatra of Puri is celebrated worldwide. It is the journey of Lord Jagannath, along with brother Balabhadra and sister Subhadra from their abode, Shreemandir, to the Gundicha temple. There is no precedence anywhere else where the presiding deity comes out of the main temple and goes on an annual...
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Breathing buildings - Hari Pulakkat, Economic Times
An R&D centre gives back more power than it takes; a residential complex and a hospital have cut power and water consumption by 40-60 per cent. Green buildings are gaining momentum and could account for 20 per cent of all construction by 2030. If you want a taste of the green building movement in India, there are plenty of interesting places to visit in cities.
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Mapping, and sharing, the consumer genome - Natasha Singer, NYT
IT knows who you are. It knows where you live. It knows what you do. It peers deeper into American life than the F.B.I. or the I.R.S., or those prying digital eyes at Facebook and Google. If you are an American adult, the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits...
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The desi rule - S Rajagopalan, Pioneer
A number of stories have been dished out periodically from Washington on the only direction the formidable Indian American community is headed — up, up and up. Now, a comprehensive survey by the reputed Pew Research Centre puts its stamp on this phenomenon with an elaborate survey that attests the rise and rise of Indian Americans...
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The great Indian stupidity - Chetan Bhagat, ToI
With some common sense, we can get rid of outdated practices at airport. You will find many articles on how corrupt and inefficient we are as a nation, particularly our government. However, little is said on something we all face, but find it difficult to admit to - the great Indian stupidity. Sure, we have some of the smartest people on earth.
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Fleece train - Kumar Vikram, Mail Today
This has happened to many of us: We log on to the Indian Railway's website to book a tatkal ticket but the site fails to open. Not willing to take a chance, we rush to buy a confirmed ticket at the booking counter in the railway station, but none is available. But as if by magic, the friendly guy hovering near the counter offers to get us a confirmed ticket.
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Gangs of Wasseypur: An explosive treat - Sanjukta Sharma, Mint
In a rarefied space where sensuality and terror coexist, and often tenderness too, melodrama is not easily perceptible or imaginable. In Gangs of Wasseypur, it is a triumphant possibility. In characterization, and in the immediate human story of revenge and bloodbath, the first part of Anurag Kashyap’s film is thickly textured.
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Tending the body’s microbial garden - Carl Zimmer, NYT
For a century, doctors have waged war against bacteria, using antibiotics as their weapons. But that relationship is changing as scientists become more familiar with the 100 trillion microbes that call us home — collectively known as the microbiome. “I would like to lose the language of warfare,” said Julie Segre, a senior investigator...
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Google glass, Sergey Brin, and the greatest show on earth - Liviu Oprescu, PCWorld
Since we already saw Google Glass--Google's augmented reality glasses project--back in April, Sergey Brin had to think big to keep us excited about the pet project at today's Google I/O keynote. Brin didn't disappoint: rather than rehash what Google Glass is, he demonstrated "why" it is--with the most PT-Barnum-Greatest...
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Tata Emo: No glitz, but plenty of promise - Phil Patton, NYT
During a week when journalists queued for 10-minute test drives of the Tesla Model S electric sedan in Fremont, Calif., this reporter enjoyed a stint in another new E.V., albeit one with decidedly less curb appeal. No flag-waving employees, no charismatic chief executives and no governors had congregated on June 19 around...
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Returning to the age of Ranade - Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, Mint
Narendra Modi recounted an interesting episode during one of his recent public meetings. The Gujarat chief minister was in Dwarka, where he met a group of local women. He asked how many of them were educated. To his surprise, the women over 80 raised their hands while many of the younger women did not. This is not the usual pattern in most parts of India where younger citizens are more likely...
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Liquid City: How alcohol made Bangalore - Raghu Karnad, Caravan
The elevator doors bing open at the 16th floor and the liftman, a pair of furred ears pinned to a sunken chest, mumbles this as you step out. You’re at the Skyye Bar, standing above a shining colossus of shops and clubs and lifts and executive offices and a luxury car wash and escalators and lots more lifts. You’re at the top of the city of Bangalore.
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Rural BPOs promise a revolution in small towns - Srivatsa Krishna, ToI
When someone who has never seen an ATM card or a credit card has to learn about a loyalty card product and its features, understand the member's query, investigate the issue by accessing the client's loyalty management system, and formulate the response in English in a manner that satisfies the client, it is sheer magic. And when this someone is a 12thclass pass...
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Cayman's Envy: How a US state thrives as a global tax haven - Leslie Wayne, Economic Times
Nothing about 1209 North Orange Street hints at the secrets inside. It's a humdrum office building, a low-slung affair with a faded awning and a view of a parking garage. Hardly worth a second glance. If a first one. But behind its doors is one of the most remarkable corporate collections in the world: 1209 N Orange, you see, you see, is the legal address of no fewer...
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The first Guru is born - Sadhguru, Times of India
On days when the moon is full, its vibration, its feel, is very different than on other days. For a spiritual seeker, this day is like a boon from nature. Earlier, Guru Purnima was among the most important festive occasions in the country. Over time, it got relegated to the background due to ignorance and so fewer people were aware of its great significance. Guru Purnima is the day the first guru was born.
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The Bose in the particle - Amit Chaudhuri, Guardian
With yesterday’s announcement of the latest findings in the search for the Higgs boson, the elusive particle is on everyone’s mind. This kind of fame is relatively rare, even for important scientific discoveries; but the Higgs boson has been called, or miscalled, the God particle, enabling it to pass into the realm of popular scientific lore, like the discovery of the smallpox vaccine, the structure of DNA...
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Brazil learns to drape the sari - Patralekha Chatterjee, Asian Age
Politics and economics are not the only things that bind Brazil and India. The two emerging economic powers with increasing geo-political clout also share a passion for melodramatic love stories on the screen. If India has Bollywood, Brazil has its “telenovela”, a dramatic soap opera. Call it good karma, or that all-too familiar adventurous spirit which seizes many journalists in the middle of covering...
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Booming India, but too few toilets - Frank-Jurgen Richter, Business Standard
India is a bustling, vibrant and noisy nation. Many of its people smile openly and offer help “Oh yes, sir”... but it only ranks 142 (of 158) in the 2012 Global Peace Index, having very poor scores on its society’s perceived criminality, access to weapons and wars fought. The overall “Peace” rankings of its near neighbours are: Pakistan (149), Bangladesh (91) and China (89). Perhaps there is something else...
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How Palak Paneer invaded Helsinki - First Post
When one thinks of this Land of the Midnight Sun, the first thing that comes to one's mind is reindeer meat. But this capital city of Finland boasts of at least two dozen Indian restaurants that serve mouth-watering palak paneer, chole-naan, kadi-pakora, butter chicken and other delicacies. How come Indian food is a major hit with the Finns?
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Is the web driving us mad? - Tony Dokoupil, Daily Beast
Before he launched the most viral video in Internet history, Jason Russell was a half-hearted Web presence. His YouTube account was dead, and his Facebook and Twitter pages were a trickle of kid pictures and home-garden updates. The Web wasn’t made “to keep track of how much people like us,” he thought, and when his own tech habits made him feel like “a genius, an addict, or a megalomaniac,”...
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Indian connection to the God particle: From scientific expertise to Shiva's dance - Jaimon Joseph, CNN-IBN
It's being hailed as the biggest scientific discovery of the 21st century. After 50 years of searching - scientists have finally found the Higgs boson - commonly called the God particle. A Nobel prize winner, Leon Lederman, had actually called it the "God-damn" particle - because it was so bloody hard to find.
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Capital develops a taste for stately fare - Esha Mahajan, Times of India
Think Bihari cuisine and chances are your mind draws a complete blank. Take it a step further to "gourmet" Bihari, and you're stumped. It's no secret that regional food in Delhi has been an esoteric fare. But the apathy towards it is now giving way to an avid curiosity, as people explore a variety of cuisines. Puja Sahu, who co-owns the city's first and only Bihari restaurant...
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The last of the gentle giants - Sugata Ghosh & Nandini Raghavendra, Economic Times
Jaipur, in the mid-1960s. A deafening applause erupted from the 30,000-strong crowd as the wrestlers paced around the ring with bold battle cries and spectacular gestures. Sensing a sell-out show, the organiser, a young man, rubbed his hands in glee, clueless that he could lose his shirt. Little did he know that the manager had pocketed the money...
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Angrezi nation - Gayatri Jayaraman, Mint
In this country three things matter: money, fame and language. You can have money and fame, but if you still don’t have the language, you have not ‘arrived’. It may not be as big a divider as rich and poor. But it is big; they will call you ‘vernac’, and ‘ghati’. It is now against the law to use those terms,” says Gauri Shinde, director of the forthcoming Hindi film, English Vinglish, seated on a swing...
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In New York City, farms take root on Roofs - Lisa W Foderaro, NYT
Back in the 1960s, Lisa Douglas, the Manhattan socialite played by Eva Gabor in the television sitcom “Green Acres,” had to give up her “penthouse view” to indulge her husband’s desire for “farm livin’.” Today, she could have had both. New York City (the stores!) is suddenly a farming kind of town (the chores!). Almost a decade after the last family farm...
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The murky trail of stolen antiquities - A Srivathsan, Hindu
When antique dealer Subhash Chandra Kapoor, 61, arrested in Germany and extradited to India for his alleged role in spiriting away 18 temple idols from Tamil Nadu, was produced before the Ariyalur court on Saturday, it marked the second most sensational development of its kind in the country. It also pointed once again to the inscrutable ways...
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Against the odds - Renu Kohli, Business Standard
Breaking Out is a book that will resonate with many talented Indian women who are ambitious enough to dream big. Set in India in the 1940s and thereafter, the book is economist Padma Desai’s chronicle of her evolution, indeed, escape from tragic personal circumstances, to become an internationally recognised economist. Academically brilliant, Ms Desai moved in the 1950s from Surat...
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Stars, not sun, predict monsoons accurately - Sandhya Jain, Pioneer
According to the Hindu panchang, the month of sawan which along with bhadon comprises India’s monsoon season, began on July 4; rains drenched this parched city on July 5. Was the monsoon on time, or ‘'delayed’ as the Met office kept lamenting? The Union Ministry of Agriculture was clueless how to reassure farmers who sowed the kharif crop too early.
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The new small-town chic - Sidharth Bhatia, Times of India
In Mehboob Khan's Mother India (1957), Nargis shoots her wayward son in the end because, by becoming a kind of rebel, he has brought dis-honour to his family, his village and by extension to India. Rebelliousness, even against injustice, disturbs the equilibrium of the perfect Indian social model as manifested in the village. It is Nargis, who, despite her trials and tribulations and the harassment...
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Achchha toh hum chalte hain - Avijit Ghosh, Times of India
Once upon a time, there was a Rajesh Khanna. Men aped him. Women worshipped him. And girls married his photographs, smudged his car with lipsticks and waited late night outside hotels hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Once when he had fever, a group of college students spent hours taking turns to put ice water on his forehead in a photograph. In the history of Hindi cinema...
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A preview of an Olympic-sized Fiasco - Marco Evers, Spiegel
It's never easy to be a Londoner, not even on a perfectly normal workday in an English summer. Everyone, whether rich or poor, experiences the same hardships of big-city life in London. For Londoners, the day begins with aircraft noise -- which some never get used to -- partly because double- or triple-paned windows are in short supply, even in Europe's most expensive city.
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A silver lining under the sea - William J Broad, Hindu
It doesn’t glisten, but it does have a story to tell. Forty-eight tonnes of silver bullion that spent more than 70 years at the bottom of the North Atlantic have been hauled to the surface and returned to its rightful owner, the British government, according to the company that recovered it. And much more will be on its way soon. The silver was recovered from the SS Gairsoppa, which was carrying the riches to England...
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Nobody asked us for medical certificates - Pritha Chatterjee & Mir Ehsan, Indian Express
Eighty-six and counting. With two weeks still left for the Amarnath Yatra to draw to a close, the pilgrim death count on the mountain trail looks set to cross last year’s toll of 105. Inquiries by The Indian Express reveal that most deaths this season have been due to health reasons, that pilgrims have been concealing their medical history of cardiac and respiratory problems...
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The quest for the Suthamalli Nataraja - A. Srivathsan, Hindu
An 800-year-old Nataraja bronze, stolen about four years ago from Suthamalli, a remote Tamil Nadu village, is at the centre of a quickly unravelling story of illicit international trade in antiquities. Hot pursuit of sculpture’s trail provided key evidence that led to the extradition to India in mid-July of Subhash Chandra Kapoor, an antique gallery owner from New York...
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In Mysore, keeping Sanskrit alive on newsprint - Raksha Kumar, New York Times
In the sleepy old part of Mysore, there is frantic activity at dawn in one small alley, as Sampath and Jayalakshmi Kumar are busy at work. “This might not pay, but it is something I have devoted my life to,” said Sampath Kumar, editor of Sudharma, as he stands in front of an old typesetting machine that is used to publish newspapers.
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Epic work in progress - Nirmala Sitharaman, Asian Age
An unabridged translation of the Mahabharata’s 80,000 shlokas, or two million words? Even at the risk of sounding cliched, it is indeed, an effort of epic proportions. Conceding that it is a tough venture, Bibek Debroy, the author, expects to complete it by 2014. On an average, the author translates a chapter (1,500-2,000 words) a day. Covering about 10 per cent of the Mahabharata in each volume...
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The sale of an Indica and a lesson in developmental econ - Monika Halan, Mint
I did not know that when I put my eight-year-old, beat-up Indica (should have clicked the faces of some people when the family would get into that car!) up for sale that the experience will become a lesson in developmental economics and will document a little part of the story of a transforming country. A viable Metro system, fire-snorting SUV drivers, jammed roads...
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Ouch Oprah, it hurts! - Sindhuja Balaji, Asian Age
The woman who managed to tug at the heartstrings of millions has now succeeded in rubbing people off the wrong way. Oprah’s much-publicised visit to India has been shrouded with controversy from day one and now, her latest episode Oprah’s Next Chapter: India has ruffled some feathers. “So, I hear some people in India still eat with their hands”— this comment has triggered...
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Gourmet prasad for guaranteed nirvana at Capital’s temples - Shara Ashraf, Hindustan Times
Piping hot momos, noodles, brownies… gourmet prasad (offerings) courtesy Delhi’s elite appears to have replaced the traditional halwa and aloo bhaji. Ordered from fancy eateries and caterers, the goodies sitting pretty in fancy boxes are distributed to the poor who queue up outside temples daily, perhaps for their only guaranteed meal of the day.
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Veni, vidi... veshti! - Rasheeda Bhagat, Business Line
K.R. Nagaraj failed his SSLC exam because he flunked typewriting. “My family could not afford the monthly fee of Rs 15 others paid to practise in an institution.” He is quick to add that in all other subjects he got “first class marks”. For the founder of Ramraj Cotton, it has been a long and exciting journey from those trying teen years; today the Ramraj group — which is into dhotis...
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Pak SC settles bitter battle over humble samosa - Indian Express
Alas! The days of cheap samosas in Pakistan is over. Ending a legal wrangle over the price of the humble samosa, the Supreme Court has set aside a notification of the Punjab government whereby the price of one 'samosa' was fixed at Rs 6. The samosa, till early this week, was caught up in a legal tussle between the provincial government and Punjab Bakers...
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Rebirth of 'Garm Hava' - Nandini Ramnath, Mint
It was 1972, and the Indian New Wave was coming along nicely. The government-funded Film Finance Corporation (FFC) was handing out loans to directors who wanted to break away from the escapist and formulaic movies being churned out by the Hindi movie dream factory. Some film-makers were more interested in nightmares, among them M.S. Sathyu, who had earned a name for himself lighting...
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The pill pushers - Priyanka Sharma, Sushmi Dey & Indulekha Aravind, Business Standard
Amit Kumar was 22 when he was hired by a big pharmaceutical company as a medical representative in 1994. After 45 days of training, his sales target was fixed at Rs 75 lakh for the year. He visited several chemists in the area assigned him to find out who the popular doctors were and what medicines they were prescribing. Soon he had a list of 200 doctors with high...
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Queen’s language gets its King's share from India - Omkar Sapre, Economic Times
Joanna Turnbull says she will revert on if jugaad will make the cut, but for now, she has to airdash back to UK. Jugaad's one of the new words she heard in Pune during her India trip, and, well, she's been told it's English. Turnbull is used to that. She is one of the modern day arbitrators of English language— as the managing editor of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary...
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A five-ring opening circus, weirdly and unabashedly british - Sarah Lyall, NYT
With its hilariously quirky Olympic opening ceremony, a wild jumble of the celebratory and the fanciful; the conventional and the eccentric; and the frankly off-the-wall, Britain presented itself to the world Friday night as something it has often struggled to express even to itself: a nation secure in its own post-empire identity, whatever that actually is.
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A soldier gives and forgets, but a ‘neta’ gets and forgets - Bindu Shajan Perappadan, Hindu
A soldier gives and forgets, but a ‘neta’ gets and forgets and that is the attitude that hurts us the most,” says Tripta Thapar, mother of Captain Vijayant Thapar who died while leading an attack of 2 Rajputana Rifles at Tololing during the Kargil War on June 29, 1999. He was 22 and is a fourth generation officer in his family. Sitting beside his photo in her Noida home...
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Mystery woman part of Boyle’s team, from Bangalore - Shivani Naik, Indian Express
The name is Madhura Nagendra, a post-graduate student from Bangalore. On Sunday, the mystery woman who was spotted walking alongside flag-bearer Sushil Kumar during the opening ceremony got a name and an identity of sorts. Reacting to the noise by the Indian camp over the un-accredited, unauthorised, unwanted presence...
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Is algebra necessary? - Andrew Hacker, NYT
A typical American school day finds some six million high school students and two million college freshmen struggling with algebra. In both high school and college, all too many students are expected to fail. Why do we subject American students to this ordeal? I’ve found myself moving toward the strong view that we shouldn’t. My question extends beyond algebra and applies more broadly to the usual mathematics...
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Gore Vidal quotes: 26 of the best - Guardian
Gore Vidal, the celebrated writer, has died aged 86. He was famous for his acerbic wit. Here are some of his best quotes... "Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice like, Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin."
"Envy is the central fact of American life." "The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since."
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Ghost city London - James Chapman & Hugo Duncan, Daily Mail
Overblown warnings of Olympics travel chaos are turning key sites into ‘ghost towns’ and threatening Britain’s economic recovery, say business leaders. Messages to stay away from London and other key venues have worked too well, with visitor numbers suffering catastrophic falls. Incredibly, almost a third of the five million people employed in the capital are expected to heed official advice to work...
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Danish artist designs $10 solar lamp, to sell in India - Ullekh NP, Economic Times
enowned Iceland-origin Danish artist Olafur Eliasson has designed a cheap-yet-hip solar-powered lamp that he expects to be a hit in countries such as India. Priced at $10 (Rs 560), weighing 120gm and named the 'Little Sun', it could be all the rage among both the rich and poor, hopes the 45-year-old artist who collaborated with engineer-friend Frederik Ottesen to make the lamp.
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The Mughal Melting Pot - Vandana Kalra, Express India
It was four years before Shah Abbas, the Safavid ruler of the Persian empire, captured Kandahar from Jahangir. The Mughal emperor had dreamt of ruling over the Iranian ruler. While most of Jahangir’s associates were aware of his political ambitions, in 1618, one of his closest aides, Abu’l Hasan, painted his desire in ink and gold. Among the finest painters of the imperial atelier...
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The hi-tech Guru - Indira Kannan, Indian Express
There were witticisms on the upcoming US presidential elections and about Tamilians’ addiction to filter coffee — but Toronto’s Tamil community was not at a stand-up comedy show; instead, it was part of a religious discourse about the teachings of the Vaishnavite saint Nammazhwar by Vedic scholar and orator Velukkudi Krishnan. For over seven years, hordes of Tamils have been waking up...
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If they're Brits, we call it tactics. If not, it's cheating - Musa Okwonga, Independent
Whenever competitors try to work around the rules of a sport, there is a thin line between being cute and being a cheat. Some athletes eye this line as carefully as they watch the edges of their own lanes: and others pole vault well clear of it. These Olympic Games have already seen plenty of participants both suspected of and criticised for morally dubious conduct.
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Don’t fear the cybermind - Daniel M Wegner, Deccan Chronicle
The line that separates my mind from the Internet is getting blurry. This has been happening ever since I realised how often it feels as though I know something just because I can find it with Google. Technically, of course, I don’t know it. But when there’s a smartphone or iPad in reach, I know everything the Internet knows. Or at least, that’s how it feels. This curious feeling of knowing has settled...
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In search of American industry - Ashoak Upadhyay, Business Line
In 1970, scientists at the research centre in Corning, the famed glassmaking firm in upstate New York, developed a breakthrough in communications technology by discovering “low-loss optical fibres” capable of maintaining the strength of laser light over vast distances. The breakthrough was to revolutionise communications technology, expand bandwidth as never before.
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Passion, compassion and oversight - MS Sriram, Business Standard
Social enterprises are the flavour of the season. We are now not only talking about newer enterprises, but also getting back to the older, iconic institutions and checking out whether they fit into the new nomenclature. Earlier, they used to be called non-profits or charitable institutions. Clearly, times have changed. The book on Sankara Nethralaya is written...
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Where winning is everything - Minxin Pei, Indian Express
The performance of Chinese athletes in the Olympics since 1984, when China first participated in the Games, has been nothing short of spectacular. If we use the medal count as a yardstick, China’s haul of gold, silver, and bronze in the summer Olympics has tripled between 1984 and 2008. At the London Olympics, China has once again proved its prowess in winning medals.
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Where streets are thronged with strays baring fangs - Gardiner Harris, NYT
Victims of the surprise attacks limp into one of this city’s biggest public hospitals. Among the hundreds on a recent day were children cornered in their homes, students ambushed on their way to class and old men ambling back from work. All told the same frightening story: stray dogs had bitten them. Deepak Kumar, 6, had an angry slash across his back from a dog...
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The mathemagician - Nikhil Menon, Economic Times
When his cousin Nadia started having some trouble with math eight years ago, Boston-based hedge fund analyst Salman 'Sal' Khan was only too glad to help. Since she was based in New Orleans, Sal used Yahoo!'s interactive Doodle notepad and a telephone to tutor her after work hours. And when Nadia began doing better at school, Sal began tutoring his other cousins and family members.
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Sound-clouding centuries - Shamik Bag, Mint
Dwarkin & Son Pvt. Ltd, says Pratap Ghosh, one of three partners of the Kolkata-based musical instrument manufacturing company established in 1875, was not exactly set up as a rant against the British. In fact, Ghosh mentions dispassionately, Dwarkin was handheld by European mentors in its early days; the name of the company too is an Anglicization. The name Dwarkin resulted from a pairing...
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The Indian who landed Curiosity - Shobha John, ToI
The world watched as Curiosity, the Mars rover, triumphantly landed on the red planet this week. There were whoops of joy and euphoria among those who had toiled for years to make this possible. But for one Virginia-based Indian entrepreneur and engineer, it was a moment of quiet elation. Dr Renjith Kumar, 49, is the CEO of a company which was closely involved with the rover's Entry...
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Rubik’s cube twists back into limelight - Douglas Quenqua, NYT
The clatter of 200 Rubik’s Cubes twisting in unison filled the ballroom at the Riviera hotel and casino last week as Riley Woo, 15, stepped to the stage. Shick shick shick shick. He took a few moments to study a jumbled cube, then pulled a blindfold over his eyes and started to twist. Shick shick shick shick shick. Forty-eight seconds later, Riley lifted his blindfold and smiled.
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God’s own museum - Swati Sharma, NewIndianExpress
It’s described as India’s biggest mythological theme museum. Whether it’s the vanavasam (life in forest-exile) of Lord Rama or the churning of the ksheera sagaram (milky ocean), this museum presents Indian mythology to devotees, especially youngsters, in a simplified manner. The aim of the 18-acre museum, Kunda Satyanarayana Kaladhamam at Yadagirigutta in Nalgonda...
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Olympic song of Solomon - Renuka Bisht, Financial Express
Much as one loves Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, David Bowie’s Fashion, Pet Shop Boys’ East End Boys, and West End Girls, The Who’s I’m talkin’ ‘bout my generation, and all the other Brit pop ‘classics’ that were belted out at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, John Lennon’s Imagine has a special place in one’s heart and mind. But was this the song most at odds with the moment?
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Poo power celebrated as solar toilet wins prize - Mark Tran, Hindu
A solar powered toilet that breaks down water and human waste into hydrogen gas for use in fuel cells has won first prize in a competition for next-generation toilets to improve sanitation in the developing world. The California Institute of Technology in the United States received the $100,000 first prize for its design. Loughborough University in the United Kingdom...
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Ahmedabad: Shaken and stirred - Mayur Bhatt, Business World
It is a breathtaking 360-degree view of Ahmedabad from the city’s revolving restaurant, Patang, which overlooks the majestic Sabarmati river and its recently cleaned white sand riverfront. It has been a few months since riverfront encroachments and slums were removed to create a 300-mt-wide ‘beach’. High bunds are being built to keep the river in check. The city’s master plan envisages a promenade...
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Can Gates do for the toilet what he did for the computer? - Lisa Beyer, Bloomberg
Bill Gates is not a squeamish man. He also has an abiding faith in technology. And so it is that the former head of Microsoft Corp., now co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has turned his attention to the reinvention of the toilet. As Gates knows, two-thirds of the world's people have no access to that great leap in sanitation, credited with adding a decade...
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The return of the veil - Sunanda K Datta-Ray, Asian Age
A newspaper picture of Mrs Sonia Gandhi talking to a victim of the Assam riots intrigued me. The victim, presumably a Bengali-speaking Muslim or Assamese, wore a salwar-kameez with a dupatta across her chest. In contrast, Mrs Gandhi had draped herself in a sari. You might say she is never seen in anything else. But here’s the rub. The Italian-born leader of India’s Congress Party had decorously...
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On the Yamunabahn - Mayank Austen Soofi, Mint
There are no dhabas, no burger joints—not yet. Neither is there a rail crossing. You will not pass through a single town. The Yamuna Expressway takes you from Delhi to Agra in less than 2 hours. The Bhopal Shatabdi Express, India’s fastest train, takes 2 hours and 11 minutes. A tatkal ticket for the Bhopal Shatabdi Express costs Rs. 370; on the expressway, cars have to pay a toll tax of Rs. 320 (one-way).
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Cities and sparrows - Business Standard
The Delhi government last week announced that the house sparrow would be, from now on, the official bird of the state. The little, chirruping birds were traditionally a familiar part of life in India’s capital — sitting on window ledges and telephone wires, nesting in the spring and flying about at dusk in great flocks. Yet those who have seen Delhi only in the past decade or so will have few such memories...
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Lost anthem: Song Jinnah asked Hindu poet to write - Sonya Fatah, Times of India
I stumbled upon this bit of anthem trivia in my inbox the other day; the Urdu poet, Jagan Nath Azad penned the first Pakistani national anthem, at the behest of Jinnah. From my sketchy memory of the terribly dull history books written by the pantheon of Pakistan Studies — the man we honoured for the Qaumi Tarana was Hafeez Jallandari.
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VVS Laxman: The story of India's greatest match winner in Tests - Karthikayan Thyagaraja, Cricket Country
The game of cricket has been shorn of the elegant graces with the unexpected retirement of VVS Laxman. While most batsmen were absorbed in the science of batsmanship, Laxman enthralled spectators the world over by bringing out the fine arts of the game like few have in the history of the game. Laxman made his Test debut at the age of 22, on November 20...
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Me, myself, us: The human microbiome - Economist
What’s a man? Or, indeed, a woman? Biologically, the answer might seem obvious. A human being is an individual who has grown from a fertilised egg which contained genes from both father and mother. A growing band of biologists, however, think this definition incomplete. They see people not just as individuals, but also as ecosystems.
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National War Memorial to come up at India Gate - Manu Pubby, Indian Express
Clearing the path for the setting up of a National War Memorial in the capital, a Group of Ministers (GoM) has accepted the Armed Force’s recommendation for a new memorial at the India Gate complex that will honour post-Independence martyrs. A national war museum will also come up in the Princess Park area near the India Gate...
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Published, papers that show the raja as an eye surgeon - Pritha Chatterjee, Indian Express
Four centuries ago, Raja Serfoji II, a Maratha ruler of the city of Thanjavur, is said to have performed eye surgeries among the various forms of medicine he practised. Chennai-based opthalmologists have now published his handwritten records of these surgeries for the first time. The Maratha dynasty in Thanjavur, formed by Chhatrapati Shivaji’s half-brother Venkoji in 1675...
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Three days that shook Bangalore - Indulekha Aravind, Business Standard
"Hey chinky, why are you wandering around?” Regina, a 24-year-old from Manipur, has been living in Bangalore for the past five years, but this was the first time she had been accosted in this manner near her house. The one-room apartment she shares with her brother is in Austin Town near Neelasandra, identified as a trouble spot by the police. Three people from the Northeast had been attacked...
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Caste can turn a boardroom into a classroom - Aakar Patel, Mint
Any attempt to understand India without penetrating caste will hit a wall of data and crumple. The Economic & Political Weekly (EPW) has published a remarkable study on caste in our corporate boardrooms. The authors, D. Ajit, Han Donker and Ravi Saxena, inspected the boards of India’s top 1,000 companies. These companies represent 80% of the total market...
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Is tech making us stupid? - Rajiv Makhni, Hindustan Times
The above statements have been pouring in from scientific studies across the world. This is their essential premise: that multitasking between emails, Facebook, Twitter, TV, mobile phones, tablets and gaming consoles have made us perpetually distracted and a scatter-brained race. Not only is the new era of information technology making us less creative and more muddled...
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From farm to folks - Nanda Kasabe, Indian Express
Twenty three-year-old Ameya Srirang Supnekar, who owns a 12.5-acre farm in Satara near Pune, is no son of the soil. In fact, farming in his family was taken up as recently as 2000, when Supnekar’s father retired from a small engineering business and decided to lease land. But today Supnekar is not only running a successful farm, he has also sown the seeds of a marketing model...
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Silicon Valley techies fight to save a popular but illegal haven - Somini Sengupta, NYT
Hacker Dojo is equal parts shared office, lecture hall and after-hours salon for a variety of tinkerers, software coders and entrepreneurs who intend to reinvent the future. The idea for Pinterest was cooked up here. The makers of Pebble watches used the space as their West Coast headquarters. Today, however, it is threatened with extinction.
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Bollywood’s favourite father, uncle, grandfather - Priyanka Pereira, Indian Express
AK Hangal, who won many hearts with his roles as the genial father, uncle or grandfather, died here today. Hangal, 95, was admitted to hospital on August 16 after he fractured his thigh bone. He later developed other complications. Born in 1917 in Peshawar, Hangal, a tailor by profession, moved to Mumbai soon after Partition.
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Courses for courses - Indian Express
When an analysis of this year’s Joint Engineering Entrance Results found that girls have a very poor representation among IIT entrants, a professor observed that this was very likely due to parents being reluctant to send their daughters to far-off coaching hubs such as Kota in southern Rajasthan. It was in effect an acknowledgment of how important a role coaching plays in competitive exams today.
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Once upon a time in Karachi - Foreign Policy
With 18 murders and violent deaths in just the past few days, Karachi is living up to its reputation for being one of the world's most dangerous cities -- a teeming den of ethnic violence and decades-long bloody political feuds. With more than 13 million people living in this South Asian metropolis, the nerve center of Pakistan's culture and commerce, life today often means squeaking out an existence amid...
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India is moonstruck with its boy wonder - Rudraneil Sengupta, Mint
Unmukt Chand was perfectly calm. During the final of the ICC Under-19 World Cup in Townsville, Australia, the Indian side was chasing Australia’s total of 225. Chand, India’s captain, was finding the boundary with unhurried ease, flowing smoothly towards a century. At his house in Delhi, the atmosphere was a little more frantic. Neighbours, family members...
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'Chair disease' ups injury and illness risk in office - PTI
Spending hours sitting in front of a computer screen in your office poses serious health problems, including heart disease, diabetes and obesity, a new study has found. Researchers found that workers who compensate for spending hours in front of a computer by using ergonomic chairs, standing desks and good posture are still likely to suffer back, neck, wrist...
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Modi ups chic quotient on Hangout, live! - R Dinakaran, Business Line
It was all over Twitter and Facebook. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi would be answering questions - live - through Google Plus’ Hangout. The time was 8 p.m (August 31, Friday). But by the time the event began, it was well over 8.45 p.m. The reason, the response was so much that Google Plus reportedly crashed. When the Hangout began, actor Ajay Devgn...
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Spiritual small screen - Himani Chandna Gurtoo, Hindustan Times
Uma Arora, 63, an ex-government employee, spends most of her day watching spiritual channels. “If my television is on, any one of five religious channels is running. They bring some very exclusive content from renowned religious places that I can rarely visit,” she said. Watching television, you may had have caught the ‘Third eye of Nirmal Baba’, or learnt yoga from Baba Ramdev.
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Tigers and humans can cohabitate when tigers work nights - Stephanie Pappas, CSMonitor
In the forests of Nepal, daytime belongs to humans, but the night is the time of the tigers, a new study finds. The results may reveal how people and predatory cats manage to coexist. A two-year study of video from more than 70 motion-activated cameras near Chitwan National Park in south-central Nepal finds that endangered tigers aren't necessarily...
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Don't like this price? wait a minute - Julia Angwin & Dana Mattioli, WSJ
The fast-moving Internet pricing games used by airlines and hotels are now moving deeper into the most mundane nooks of the consumer economy. Deploying a new generation of algorithms, retailers are changing the price of products from toilet paper to bicycles on an hour-by-hour and sometimes minute-by-minute basis. The pricing wars were fought last month over a General Electric microwave oven.
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City of dreadful scams - Sunanda K Datta-Ray, Business Standard
Delhi is probably India’s most dishonest city. No, I don’t mean only the targets Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal rant against. I mean the way Delhi fleeces visitors and corrupts innocents. Both were worrying long before the CNNGo finding that Delhi is the world’s third worst “scam city” and “full of cons”. It wasn’t always so. My memory goes back to the early forties and life in my father’s saloon in a deserted...
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After an expressway, the slow lane to Agra - Apurva, Indian Express
It is a 25-km drive to the Taj Mahal from where the Delhi-Agra Yamuna Expressway ends. But as the famed minarets peek playfully on the horizon, excitement gradually makes way for bewilderment. It had taken us two hours to cover the 165-km stretch from Delhi to Agra, but the next 25 km to the Taj takes another two hours. It is only after navigating a labyrinth of curves...
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Ranjitsinhji, the creator of the leg glance - Navneet Mundhra, CricketNext
Cricket is a fine blend of art and science and no one in the history of the game embodied this truism more than Kumar Ranjitsinhji, fondly known as Ranji. He revolutionized the cricketing landscape with his distinct style, innovative strokeplay and sublime craftsmanship which warmed the cockles of millions of hearts. Born on September 10, 1872 near Jamnagar...
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Pashupatinath to get India's healing touch - Archana Jyoti, Pioneer
Pashupatinath Temple has been in the news lately. First, was the move to bring the temple’s finances into the public domain, which was seen as a positive step towards modernising this ancient institution. Now Nepal has sought India’s help to protect Kathmandu’s famous 5th century temple on the Bagmati River. Listed in UNESCO World Heritage Sites...
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Still waiting for a streetcar named retire - Subhendu Ray, Hindustan Times
At 80, India's Metro Man and one of the country's most prominent advocates of technocracy, Elattuvalapil Sreedharan, still longs to retire. He had stepped down as the managing director of Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) last December, packed his bags and left Delhi to settle in the remote and stunningly green coastal Kerala village of his in-laws - Ponnani.
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The temple raiders - Cordelia Jenkins & Arundhati Ramanathan, Mint
By the time the new security gate arrived at the Brihadeeswara temple in the summer of 2008, nobody in Sripuranthan, a small village in central Tamil Nadu, had been inside Shiva’s temple for decades—or so the villagers believed. Although anyone could walk into the stone-walled enclosure, open as it was on one side to the wide bed of a dried-up lake and on the other to the village, the doors of the temple itself...
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Gender politics: Now is not a good time to be a man - Economist
Men today are haunted by the “spectre of a coming gender apocalypse”, Hanna Rosin declares in her new book, “The End of Men”. How worried should they be? It is true that women are contributing more than ever to household income. They dominate university attendance around the world. In South Korea more women than men pass the foreign-service exam...
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Going to seed - Devjyot Ghoshal, Business Standard
There is a legend about Mehrangarh, the massive fortress with wide battlements and delicately decorated palaces that rises atop a desert hill in Jodhpur, Rajasthan. When Rao Jodha of Marwar began building this citadel in 1459, it is said, a hermit found himself displaced. In his anger the hermit cursed Rao Jodha’s kingdom to suffer drought. That ancient curse seemed to have lifted...
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Reality bites: Khandwa’s made-for-TV protest - Suchandana Gupta, Times of India
Welcome to the village which was in the eye of the storm with 'jal satyagrah' for the past three weeks, where people displaced by the Omkareshwar dam were recorded by television cameras in neck-deep water, agitating for compensation and land. It's a story of how the entire media was taken for a ride with the help of mobile phones, which came in handy for keeping tabs...
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Wedded to one look - Archana Jahagirdar, Business Standard
Recently, at a close friend’s brother’s wedding, the bride wore a traditional Himachali bridal outfit. I had never seen one before (and wouldn’t be able to name it either), which is shocking considering that I have lived my entire life in north India. The outfit was like a long coat or sherwani, beautifully embellished (though not embroidered), and it gave the bride a regal air — as if she was on her way...
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In search of Madurai Jigarthanda - Baradwaj Rangan, Hindu
Sheikh Abdul Qader is not an easy man to miss. For one, he runs the most famous jigarthanda store in Madurai, the rather immodestly (if obviously) named Famous Jigarthanda. Secondly, when this affable 50-year-old smiles, as he is wont to whenever he speaks, he reveals a mouth only partially filled with teeth, which are all on the left side. “I am a sugar patient,” he says, trying to explain away...
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Climb to the Top - Aaditi Jathar Lakade, Indian Express
Sherpas are to Mount Everest expeditions what pit crews are to Formula 1 racing. While the younger generation is looking for avenues beyond the mountains, it’s never done until they’ve summited the peak. India has set new records this year in climbing Mount Everest. An eight-member team from Pune’s mountaineering institute, Giripremi, became India’s largest all-civilian group from one city to reach the mountain...
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Coal dust in the Tagore album - Vikram Doctor, Economic Times
For a product that India possesses in abundance and which, as we have seen recently, has abundant power to cause political chaos, the actual history of coal mining in the subcontinent is relatively recent. DP Jha of the Indian School of Mines in Dhanbad, in a paper on this subject, points out that there is no definite Sanskrit name for mined coal and that while Kautilya's Arthashastra specifically...
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Ego fuels growth of mile-high skyscrapers - Bonnie Cao, Bloomberg
A mile-high skyscraper, almost double the height of today’s tallest building, may become a reality by 2025 as developing countries splurge cash in an ego- fueled race to construct the world’s highest tower. “If you have enough money, I’m sure the human mind can create a lot higher,” said Timothy Johnson, an architect and chairman of the Chicago-based Council...
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When Salman Khan’s home turns Lord Ganesha’s abode… - Zee News
We all know for a fact that Hindi cinema’s very own hunk Salman Khan is secular to the core. The actor has had a cosmopolitan upbringing as his parents belong to different faiths- his father Salim Khan (Muslim), his mother now Salma (earlier Sushila Charak, a Hindu) and step mother Helen, a Catholic. The actor’s family that resides in Galaxy apartments in Bandra...
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Hijacked - Robert Young Pelton, Foreign Policy
In October of last year, I set sail from Dubai on an aging 160-meter cargo ship laden with supplies for Somalia. For me, as publisher of Somalia Report, it was a chance to experience pirate waters up close. I had met pirates on land and in prison, and had counted their captured ships neatly lined up from the air -- but I had never visited them at their 3.2 million-square-mile workplace.
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Chettinadu's ancestral mansions - T E Narasimhan, Business Standard
Umayal is 90 years old, frail but still active and sharp. She lives alone in an enormous old house in the small village of Athangudi in Sivaganga district, Tamil Nadu. She came to the village, and the house, at age 16 after her wedding. Her husband died many years ago, and her sons and grandsons live in Chennai or outside India. “Till 10 years ago,” says Umayal, “at least 30 people lived in this house.
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Power, pollution and the Internet - James Glanz, NYT
Jeff Rothschild’s machines at Facebook had a problem he knew he had to solve immediately. They were about to melt. The company had been packing a 40-by-60-foot rental space here with racks of computer servers that were needed to store and process information from members’ accounts. The electricity pouring into the computers was overheating Ethernet sockets and other crucial components.
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India’s feet and minds - Esther Dyson, Project Syndicate
Last month, I visited the Jaipur Foot clinic in New Delhi. You may have heard of the Jaipur Foot. It is both an invention—a prosthetic foot made from cheap materials costing about $45 (versus $8,000 for a similar device in the US)—and an amazing, low-cost network of clinics around the world that has served more than 1.3 million people with new limbs, calipers, and crutches.
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I'm sorry, Steve Jobs: We could have saved you - Siddhartha Mukherjee, Daily Beast
We are failing to treat and prevent cancer—even as the promise of life-saving remedies await us. On the anniversary of Steve Jobs’s death, leading oncologist and the author of The Emperor of All Maladies Siddhartha Mukherjee explains how we failed to save an icon and why we will lose so many more lives if we do not give cancer research the funding it deserves.
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Absent libraries, photocopied minds - Nilanjana S Roy, Business Standard
Once the ragging was over, freshers at Delhi University (DU) often went through a more pleasant initiation rite — the handing over of stacks of photocopied notes and chapters from books, a legacy passed down from seniors to their juniors. Those stacks were substantial enough to qualify as quasi-books in their own right. Some of these faux anthologies...
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Not in their comfort zone - R Rajkhowa, Hindu
Compared to the rest of India, the eastern States of West Bengal, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, the seven north-eastern States and Sikkim lag in almost all the measures of economic growth. Productivity in these States is low, infrastructure poor and employment opportunities meagre. Overall, the perception is that people of eastern India are lazy and unproductive. Many factors play a part...
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Gorilla glass - Bryan Gardiner, Wired
Don Stookey knew he had botched the experiment. One day in 1952, the Corning Glass Works chemist placed a sample of photosensitive glass inside a furnace and set the temperature to 600 degrees Celsius. At some point during the run, a faulty controller let the temperature climb to 900 degrees C. Expecting a melted blob of glass and a ruined furnace, Stookey opened the door to discover that, weirdly...
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Wants the prize, but unwilling to pay the price - Greg Chappell, Hindu
Like many others I am sure, I was saddened to see Virender Sehwag left out of the Indian team this week. Despite my frustrations with him during my tenure as Indian coach I could not help but love him. He is, after all, a loveable rogue. And he can bat better than most. In fact, he is the most gifted ball striker that I have seen. I remember well the first time...
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In Jaipur, an old royal ‘secret tunnel’ is open - Narayan Bareth, Asian Age
There have always been myths about secret passages and tunnels in historic forts, but in Jaipur myth turned into reality Sunday when Rajasthan tourism minister Bina Kak inaugurated a much-talked-about tunnel linking the fabled Amber Palace to Jaigarh Fort. Princess Diya Kumari, a scion of the erstwhile Jaipur royal family, was on hand as Ms Kak opened...
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The red symbol of civility - Aakar Patel, Mint
The principal business of India’s women is to gossip and eat paan. This is what the Venetian Niccolo Manucci reported on first reaching Surat in 1655. So much of this stuff did the ladies chew, Manucci said, thatShah Jahan gifted the revenues of Surat to his poet daughter Jahan-ara, to cover her paan expenses. At this point, I rejected this offensive story (what? All of Surat produced only enough revenue to cover an aunty’s...
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In search of Bikaneri Bhujia - Swati Daftuar, Hindu
In 1877, during the reign of Maharaja Shri Dungar Singh, the first batch of bhujia was produced in the princely state of Bikaner. In September 2010, the by-now-famous Bikaneri Bhujia was given the Geographical Indication tag, ensuring that none other than those registered as authorised users (or at least those residing inside the geographic territory) would be allowed to use the popular product name...
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Why UK Indians are moving back - Rajini Vaidyanathan, Deccan Chronicle
When my parents emigrated from India in the 1960s, they sought what might be called the “British dream”: stability, opportunity and the chance of a better life in the world’s third-largest economy. So when I told my parents that I was moving to India for the same sort of reasons, they were shocked. India may be going up in the world, but what about the corruption, bureaucracy, pollution...
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Rurban India: The new consumer frontier - Cordelia Jenkins, Anupama Chandrashekharan & Anuja, Mint
D. Sudha’s clientele has become more choosy. No longer satisfied with run-of-the-mill fairness creams, the women who shop at her outlet are demanding superior products. “They watch television and come back with all these queries,” said Sudha. “They used to ask for Pond’s White Beauty, but now they are asking for something...
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The secret of Harvard's success: Alumni control - Shailendra R Mehta, Project Syndicate
No country dominates any industry as much as the United States dominates higher education. According to Shanghai Jiao-Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities, for example, 17 of the world’s 20 best universities are American, with Harvard topping the list by a substantial margin. The traditional explanation for this phenomenon – America’s wealth...
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Dior's magic element: Madurai's jasmine flower - Priya M Menon, ToI
The flower market of Tamil Nadu's Madurai is a crowded, busy place. It is the place the perfumer creator of French fashion house Christian Dior, Francois Demachy, visits every year to imbibe the fragrances that help him create the floral perfumes that Dior is renowned for. Dior uses extracts of jasmine sambac and tuberose sourced from Tamil Nadu, along with other raw materials...
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Heaven is real: A doctor’s experience with the afterlife - Eben Alexander, Daily Beast
When a neurosurgeon found himself in a coma, he experienced things he never thought possible—a journey to the afterlife. As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences. I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon. I followed my father’s path and became an academic neurosurgeon, teaching at Harvard...
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Domestic workers in India: Jagannath's day - Economist
At 7 O’Clock each morning, Jagannath Mandal is up and dressed in his white working clothes, making fresh ginger tea for “Madam”, whom he never calls by name. Mr Mandal will today juggle the roles of cook, driver, butler, cleaner and laundryman. He will be on his feet for 11 hours, albeit with an afternoon break. Mr Mandal is one of India’s tens of millions of domestic...
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The filmi ecosystem - Vanita Kohli-Khandekar, Business Standard
Anurag Kashyap speaks about cinema with passion. At TV.NXT, a television industry event in Mumbai last week, he talked about how TV stations in Europe funded some of the best films he saw. And he rued the fact that the Indian film industry can’t seem to get enough money and people interested in “different” cinema. Mr Kashyap, who made Dev D and Gangs of Wasseypur, among other films, has spent his entire...
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The hotel king, mind it! - Vir Sanghvi, Hindustan Times
Somehow when you think of state-of-the-art deluxe hotels, you don’t think of Chennai. But these days Chennai is India’s most happening hotel city. There is a smart and much-praised Hilton. The Taj has a new hotel on Mount Road called Taj Club House to add to the Coromandel, the Connemara, and the wonderful Fisherman’s Cove. The shell that was supposed to be an Oberoi has finally opened as a Hyatt Regency...
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The brain of the beast: Google's top-secret data center - Steven Levy, Wired
If you’re looking for the beating heart of the digital age — a physical location where the scope, grandeur, and geekiness of the kingdom of bits become manifest—you could do a lot worse than Lenoir, North Carolina. This rural city of 18,000 was once rife with furniture factories. Now it’s the home of a Google data center. Engineering prowess famously catapulted...
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Ice - Robert Macfarlane, DesignObserver
Of the many sacred mountains of Buddhism, the holiest is Mount Kailash in Western Tibet, where the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Indus and the Sutlej all have their source, and around whose base pilgrims have been walking circuits of notorious arduousness for thousands of years. The most extreme form of this kora — the Tibetan-Buddhist term for the form of pilgrimage in which the walker...
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The lost river - Michel Danino, Pioneer
The now dried up Saraswati river holds the key to many riddles of ancient Indian history — from the fate of the Harappans to the identity of the Vedic people. A convergence of archaeological, geological and climatic studies may soon provide us some answers. The riddle of the Saraswati river never goes long out of public view. The fascination the lost river has exerted on Indian minds is understandable...
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The maker of dreams - Priyanka Pereira, Indian Express
In 1971, Yash Chopra left brother B R Chopra’s home as well as production company to set up his own venture. During his last interaction with the media on his 80th birthday on September 27, he recalled: “I had got married and I needed more money. When I told bhai saab he gave me his blessings and told me that from today I was on my own.” His venture’s first film, Daag — starring Rajesh Khanna...
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Ravana’s Jodhpur ancestors hero-worship him - Lokpal Sethi, Pioneer
During Dussehra when Ramlila is played across the country and Ravana’s effigies are burnt as good triumphing over evil, a small community from Jamnagar in Gujarat descends on this sun city to perform yagna for nine days of the Navratras to seek peace for the rakshasa king of Lanka. The Dave Brahmins of Mudgal Gotra, Jodhpur/Mandor, who were originally...
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Modern terrorism: Funny, but plotting havoc isn't easy - Charles Isherwood, NYT
If all the would-be evildoers crawling the globe were as amusing and incompetent as the dizzy threesome from “Modern Terrorism,” a new play by Jon Kern that opened on Thursday at the Second Stage Theater, the world would be a pacific place indeed. That’s a mighty “if,” of course, as grisly headlines from Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan and occasionally places...
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The man who made Nayakan - Sandhya Rao, Business Line
This is probably how Mani Ratnam will be remembered — as the man who made Nayakan. But, like the lowly caterpillar is as precious to Brahma as the darling deer, for a film-maker, every work is equally special, even if one is better than another by one’s own objective admission. This is what sets the mood for Conversations with Mani Ratnam by Baradwaj Rangan. As the title suggests, the book examines...
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Jaspal Bhatti, Sardar of Satire, dies in Punjab car crash - Jaskiran Kapoor, Indian Express
The laugh went out of laughter on Thursday as Jaspal Bhatti, one of the biggest comics of Indian television and cinema, was killed in a car crash while he was on his way to promote his latest film on the eve of its release. Bhatti, described as the King of Comedy, was 57. An ace writer, director and actor, Bhatti was a stinging social and political commentator who gave...
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The formula behind the fastest cars - Roudra Bhattacharya, Financial Express
What is Formula 1? Formula refers to a single set of rules/specifications that all competing cars must comply with in terms of car design and technology. Formula 1 is revered as the pinnacle of motorsport and the highest class in single-seater auto racing. There are 20 Grand Prix (grand prize in French) races in the 2012 season, where 24 drivers (two each from 12 teams)...
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The lessons we can learn from Baniyas - Aakar Patel, Mint
What makes the Baniya special? I am an admirer of this community that consistently produces India’s only world-class industrialists. What are their secrets? We are fortunate that the Birla family have been written about and have themselves written enough material for us to get a glimpse into the working of a successful, conservative Marwari Baniya family.
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Kumbakonam degree coffee - Olympia Shilpa Gerald, Hindu
Clay dolls painted in eye-popping green and blue and power generators that chortle to life every other hour — Kumbakonam embraces us with an explosion of colour and noise, making sure neither Navarathri nor the regular 14-hour power outages slip from our minds. As we snake our way through the higgledy-piggledy lanes of the temple town on the banks of the Cauvery — remembered for its associations...
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Can you compete with Baxter? - Vivek Wadhwa, PBS
I've reported extensively on technology and unemployment, most recently here. Now check out "Baxter", a robot you can buy for the price of a small car. Baxter underscores the insecurity of the traditional factory job. But to futurist Vivek Wadhwa, featured in the story link above, the greater threat is to China than to us. Here's an extended excerpt from our interview with him at a Singularity University...
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Advani clinches seventh world billiards title - PTI
When Pankaj Advani decided to take part in the World Billiards Championship, he had quietly made a promise to himself that nothing short of silverware would satisfy him and he kept his date with destiny. The only active player to compete at the highest level in both Billiards and Snooker, Advani had made a tough choice of picking the World...
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Sweden wants your trash - Sophia Jones, NPR
Move over Abba, Sweden has found new fame. The small Nordic country is breaking records — in waste. Sweden's program of generating energy from garbage is wildly successful, but recently its success has also generated a surprising issue: There is simply not enough trash. Only 4 percent of Swedish garbage ends up in a landfill, according to Swedish Waste Management. Due to its efficiency...
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Netherlands highways will glow in the dark from mid-2013 - Liat Clark, Wired
A smart road design that features glow in the dark tarmac and illuminated weather indicators will be installed in the Netherlands from mid-2013. "One day I was sitting in my car in the Netherlands, and I was amazed by these roads we spend millions on but no one seems to care what they look like and how they behave," the designer behind the concept...
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The secret history of the Aeron chair - Cliff Kuang, Slate
After the great dot-com bust of 2000, there was one lasting symbol of the crash: Herman Miller’s Aeron chair. The ergonomic, mesh-backed office chair was launched in 1994, at the start of the bubble; at a cost of more than $1,000 at the time, it quickly became a status symbol in Silicon Valley—spotted constantly in magazines and in cameos on TV and film.
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The banana train - Sandip Das, Financial Express
Rajesh Harjani, a fifth-generation wholesale trader in fruits, eagerly awaits the arrival of a “banana train” at the rail yard of the Azadpur mandi in Delhi, Asia’s biggest market for fruits and vegetables. The train, which is to arrive from Jalgaon, Maharashtra, is not any ordinary good trains run by the Indian Railways. With specially designed 80-odd insulated and ventilated containers...
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Words formed from place-names - VR Narayanaswami, Mint
In the last two decades there has been an abounding interest in Hinglish, and with lexicographers bringing out revised editions every other year, the interest has been sustained in Indian and foreign publications. Addressing a meeting of the Indian community, Prince Charles affirmed that the influx of Indian words has enriched English. One feature of word borrowing from India is the adoption of Indian...
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Remembering Zafar, the last Mughal - Kim Arora, Times of India
Exiled by the British to Rangoon for fighting for his land, Bahadur Shah II died lamenting the fact that he could not be buried in his own country. Today, 150 years after the last Mughal died in the country of his exile, his last wish remains unfulfilled. Zafar Mahal, a Mughal monument that stands in present-day Mehrauli, holds the tombs of the predecessors of Bahadur Shah II...
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One man, one computer, 10 million students: How Khan Academy is reinventing education - Michael Noer, Forbes
The headquarters of what has rapidly become the largest school in the world, at 10 million students strong, is stuffed into a few large communal rooms in a decaying 1960s office building hard by the commuter rail tracks in Mountain View, Calif. Despite the cramped, dowdy circumstances, youthful optimism at the Khan Academy...
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Aurobindo meets McDonalds - Sudipto Pakrasi, Indian Express
The story of the Aravind Eye Care System, which reinvented the rules of business to restore sight to the blind, is a case study for Harvard MBAs to analyse but this retelling is marked by elegance, clarity, and intimacy. It suggests that choices that seem naive or unworkable can, when executed with wisdom and integrity, yield bafflingly extraordinary results. Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy, better known...
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Beginnings of Bionic - Meghan Rosen, ScienceNews
Michael McAlpine’s shiny circuit doesn’t look like something you would stick in your mouth. It’s dashed with gold, has a coiled antenna and is glued to a stiff rectangle. But the antenna flexes, and the rectangle is actually silk, its stiffness melting away under water. And if you paste the device on your tooth, it could keep you healthy. The electronic gizmo is designed to detect dangerous bacteria...
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Abe Lincoln as you’ve never heard him - Charles McGrath, NYT
“NOW he belongs to the ages,” Edwin Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, said at the president’s deathbed. “And to the studios,” he could have added. The latest in a long parade of screen Abes, coming right on the heels of Benjamin Walker’s ax-swinging, martial arts version in “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” is Daniel Day-Lewis...
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No more secret lives - Michael Wines, NYT
Alexander Hamilton, Warren Harding, F.D.R., Ike, L.B.J., Representatives Mark Souder, Chris Lee and Anthony Weiner, Senators Gary Hart, John Ensign and David Vitter. Maybe a first lady, Grace Coolidge. And now, David H. Petraeus. There would seem to be nothing new about the weakness of otherwise powerful Washington figures in the face of temptation.
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A metro ride from Vodafone to Micromax - Ravi Teja Sharma, Economic Times
Come 2013, you may be able to alight from a metro train in Gurgaon at a station called Vodafone, which could be the world's first tube station named after a corporate sponsor. India's first private metro rail service, the Rapid MetroRail Gurgaon has signed five-year agreements with telecom service provider Vodafone and domestic handset maker Micromax to brand...
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Good things from bad motives? - Ajit Balakrishnan, Business Standard
If you ever require evidence that a group of talented scientists can pursue completely misguided and inhumane goals for years but, in the process, invent tools and techniques of fundamental benefit to humanity, one need only turn to the science of statistics. Today we use statistical methods for purposes as diverse as computing gross domestic product and planning healthcare and education...
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A future in three dimensions - Devangshu Datta, Business Standard
The latest Bond movie, Skyfall, includes the obligatory car chases and crashes. It stars the classic 1963 Aston Martin DB5, which has been the preferred 007 vahana since Goldfinger (1964). The DB5 is near-priceless, fetching recent auction prices in excess of £1 million. Skyfall “cheated”, by using one-third scale replicas for the stunt scenes. What is interesting is that 3D printing technology was used to knock...
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A four-star thriller - Anirudh Bhattacharyya, Hindustan Times
Suck it up, James Bond, you’re done. There’s a spy caper that’s captured the beltway box office in Washington that makes the latest 007 blockbuster, Skyfall, seem like a nursery book. In fact, most DC reviewers are happily giving this thriller four stars, to match those worn by its central figure, General David Petraeus. For those who came in late, here’s the plot which defies central intelligence.
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Sun fuels hearth at Akshardham - Times of India
The Akshardham temple in the capital has switched from piped natural gas to solar technology for cooking its daily quota of close to 4,000 meals every day. The solar concentrator, named ARUN®100, produces steam which powers the cooking process. "It works on the principle of a parabola. It uses an ingenious, two-dimensional, fresnelized mirror arrangement scheme to get the parabola effect.
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Supercomputing: Deeper thought - Economist
Speed fanatics that they are, computer nerds like to check the website of Top500, a collaboration between German and American computer scientists that keeps tabs on which of the world’s supercomputers is the fastest. On November 12th the website released its latest list, and unveiled a new champion. The computer in question is called “Titan”, and it lives at Oak Ridge National...
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Amul’s gen-next farmers - Harish Damodaran, Business Line
For decades, from the time of Tribhuvandas Patel and Verghese Kurien, Amul has been synonymous with the small farmer or landless labourer deriving subsistence income from selling a few litres of milk to the village cooperative society. In 2011-12, the dairy unions affiliated to Amul — that is, Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF) — procured an average of 97 lakh litres...
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Sanskrit-vanskrit - Mayank Austen Soofi, Mint
Iyam Akashvani. Samprati Vartaha Shruyantam. These are the first words you will hear every morning and evening if you tune in to Akashvani’s, or All India Radio’s (AIR’s), Sanskrit news. The announcement in Sanskrit goes, “This is Akashvani. You are now listening to the news.” Who is the announcer talking to? If you were to round up all the Sanskrit speakers in Delhi, or even the country, they might not fill up...
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Online courses to change the education landscape - Rajiv Rao, Business Standard
The word ‘MOOCS’ sounds like a cute and cuddly cousin to George Lucas’s teddy-bear-like Ewoks in a new Star Wars film. They’re far from cuddly, though, threatening much of the higher education universe with extinction — with a lot of help from Indians. Even as you read this, someone in the country is sitting in front of a computer, attending a class in public...
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Life of Pi storms China, kindles interest in Indian culture - Ananth Krishnan, Hindu
Through his critically-acclaimed film Life of Pi, Taiwan-born director Ang Lee has appeared to have succeeded in doing what the Indian government has failed to achieve over more than a decade of tourism campaigns and promotion drives in China: rekindling Chinese interest in travelling to India and in Indian culture. The film, which has scenes set in Puducherry...
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In 48 hours, 10-storey Mohali building rises up into record books - Indian Express
Exactly 48 hours after its construction began at 4.37 pm on November 29, a 10-storied building towered red and white above Mohali, and into the Limca Book of Records, on Saturday. The building has been the talk of the town these past few days and has attracted scores of people visibly amazed at the rapidity with which it rose up...
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A grand offering - Namrata Rao, Financial Express
The first thing that strikes you as you begin partaking the bhog prasad is the sheer grandiosity of it all. And then, amazement. The different and vastly varied bhog dishes keep appearing on your plate faster than you can chew. And after a point, you give in and start enjoying the different tastes and flavours. Where else will you get a chance to taste the delicious kheer with black rice straight from the temples of Manipur...
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Rajasthan turns out to be the baap of Euro gypsies - Kumar Chellappan, DNA
In 1992, the French filmmaker Tony Gatlif came to Rajasthan to film his documentary Latcho Drom, about the roots of European gypsy culture. In Europe, gypsies are known as the Roma or the Romani, and are often victimised. They don't look Caucasian, they speak their own language and their origins are mysterious. Now, thanks to the findings of a study conducted...
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The curious case of the missing jewels - Saritha Rai, Indian Express
Bangalore has never seen a case like this. A wealthy family is robbed of numerous valuables by their household staff over several years. The family remains blissfully ignorant. The theft is revealed in a roundabout manner, when the police find some expensive jewellery in the hands of an unlikely person in a neighbouring district.
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Raagas from the corner room - Sriram Srinivasan, Sanjay Vijayakumar & Sangeetha Kandavel, ET
In December and through half of January, try getting Ashok Leyland executive vicechairman R Seshasayee to be a chief guest for any function. For that matter, during this period, try luring Shriram Group veteran R Sridhar out of Chennai for days together or doing business with Nalli owner Kuppuswami Chetty between 5 pm and 7 pm every day.
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Far between and few: Delhi's bridges - Indrani Basu, Times of India
With only eight road bridges across the Yamuna in the capital, moving between different parts of the city and the suburbs of Noida and Faridabad is a test of patience. Despite massive development in the city's east and northeast in the last decade - resulting in a corresponding jump in population and vehicular traffic in these areas - only one new bridge...
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Technology will replace 80% of what doctors do - Vinod Khosla, CNN
Healthcare today is often really the "practice of medicine" rather than the "science of medicine." Take fever as an example. For 150 years, doctors have routinely prescribed antipyretics like ibuprofen to help reduce fever. But in 2005, researchers at the University of Miami, Florida, ran a study of 82 intensive care patients. The patients were randomly assigned...
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How a transformed Mother Dairy is spreading its wings — from Delhi to Dublin - Moinak Mitra, Economic Times
Last month, a rep from the Irish Dairy Board dropped by at Mother Dairy's Patparganj plant in East Delhi to shoot the breeze with Managing Director Siva Nagarajan. They met in the plush confines of the company's Innovation Centre conference room and as the conversation progressed, Nagarajan --or Naga as he's fondly called...
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America’s original ambassador of cool - Naresh Fernandes, Hindu
Few musicians have embodied the interrogative, internationalist spirit of jazz as perfectly as Dave Brubeck, the composer and pianist who died on December 5 at the age of 91. During the course of his seven-decade career, jazz evolved from being popular dance music into an esoteric art form. Brubeck was among the key figures driving that transformation.
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Up Close and Personal - Coomi Kapoor, Indian Express
A recurring theme in veteran journalist Tavleen Singh’s exceedingly readable Durbar is that the country has been let down by its rulers. Insulated from the harsh realities of the country by a cocoon of privilege, most politicians are out of touch with the real political, social and cultural problems of India, she argues. Singh traces the root cause of this phenomenon to dynastic politics...
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Desi game, global players - Jonathan Selvaraj, Indian Express
For most of the year, the ground behind the Government Senior Secondary School at Doda village in Muktsar district of Punjab is the place where children congregate rather sleepily for their morning assembly. On December 5, however, as the children gather in the morning, the excitement is palpable. They are here to watch a World Cup match. The game may be circle-style kabaddi...
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Still a temple of grandeur - Khursheed Wani, Pioneer
The Valley of Kashmir does not require any attestation to its past glory and grandeur. In every nook and cranny of the mesmerisingly beautiful region, traces of past glory and grandiose impart a sense of pride to the inhabitants. Kashmiri poet Ghulam Ahmad Mehjoor has aptly said, “Biti yuthui oosus ni, oosus waqti aki ba-ikhtiyar - Din gawahi myani kani yim praeyn kani devaar myaen (I [Kashmir] was not like this always.
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Sleepless in Ahmedabad - Economist
Not only are the students at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA), the country’s top business school, sickeningly clever. They also work disgustingly hard. “Four hours,” grins a first-year student on the two-year MBA course, when asked how much sleep he gets a night. He is debating whether to try to join McKinsey, a consultancy, pursue an economics doctorate...
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'The godfather of World music' - Jim Fusilli, WSJ
Ravi Shankar, who died Tuesday at age 92, was the best-known Indian musician in the Western world, a designation he achieved as a composer and master of the sitar. He had a seemingly insatiable appetite to explore and create new musical forms, and an amiable personality that encouraged musicians, famous or not, to study with him. Though he is best known in the West for his association with the Beatles...
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Music to our ears - A. Harikumar, Mail Today
If Pandit Ravi Shankar put Indian music on the map, his successors in the craft are doing their best to carry the legacy forward, with the masters and their melodies garnering global adulation like never before. Acclaimed Carnatic musician Sreevalsan J. Menon is up against the likes of global stalwarts Adele, Norah Jones and our very own A. R. Rahman in the race for an Oscar nod, with his compositions...
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A Dharamsala taxi driver becomes a movie star - Govind Dhar, WSJ
A documentary about a taxi driver and his impending marriage to a girl he hardly knows sounds like the plot to yet another Bollywood flick. But “When Hari Got Married” is a laugh-a-minute true story culminating in the wedding of a cheeky, whip-smart Himalayan cab driver with an ever-ready opinion and worldly pearls of wisdom to spare.
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India beats China in UK - Nicole Dastur Arsiwala, Times of India
It's been a while since chicken tikka masala was conferred with the crown of national dish of the UK. Ever since, the curry industry, as it's popularly referred to, has continued to grow, producing Indian dishes made to suit the British palette. Today, it boasts over10,000 restaurants and 80,000 employees, and an annual turnover of £3.5 billion, making it an important part of UK's economy.
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The Butterfly Valley - Nikita Puri, Mail Today
You've packed your bags in the past to go and see tigers, sea lions, bears, dolphins, ostriches and all other beings that hop, crawl, leap, fly and swim in all parts of the world, but there’s a good chance you’ve skipped over one of the most enamouring winged beauties that have graced the lands. Maybe it was because your flower or cabbage garden had butterflies, or you saw one easily enough when you were walking...
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Rocked by time - Shailaja Tripathi, Hindu
Long before art came to add value to our lives, it was life itself for us. Man painted, carved and inscribed on rocks, largely for ritualistic purposes, and many centuries later the earliest artistic creation of man is being studied and defined as rock art. “But it hasn’t been studied in a context, properly interpreted and documented,” says art historian B.L. Malla, who led the International Rock Art Festival put together...
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Ravi Shankar transformed George’s musical sensibilities - Hindu
About 700 people joined Pandit Ravi Shankar’s wife Sukanya and daughters, Norah Jones and Anoushka Shankar, at a memorial service for the sitar virtuoso at a spiritual centre in this coastal town, about 40 km north of San Diego, on Thursday. Olivia Harrison, the wife of the late Beatle, George Harrison, was among those who said their final goodbye to the musician...
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Asanas and art in America - Archana Khare Ghose, Times of India
Did you know that the great inventor Thomas Edison (1847-1931) made a film called Hindoo Fakir in 1902 which is widely regarded as the first movie ever produced by the West about India? The film's protagonist displays a variety of tricks for the camera quite a few of which could be classified as yogic postures. This film will now find a place in one of the most prestigious exhibitions...
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Dissecting a Christmas classic: A look at the iconic nativity scene - John Allemang, GlobeAndMail
Christmas begins with the birth of Jesus, but Dec. 25 wasn’t officially designated as the Nativity until the 4th century – the early Christians deliberately appropriated a holiday devoted to the sun-god, Mithras, part of the Roman winter-solstice celebrations. Actual details about the birth of Christ were scant, since he was born in obscurity, and much of the narrative depends...
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‘Theek hai?’ asks Singh; ‘Nahi,’ says twitterati - Times of India
PM Manmohan Singh’s attempt to calm an anguished nation misfired, thanks to shoddy video editing making him a target of the restive twitterati. Singh, who read an exceptionally brief statement on Monday morning — a week after Nirbhaya’s gang rape — ended the speech by asking “theek hai?” While in itself the remark was just to check if the audio-video recording...
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Chetan Bhagat, India's Dickens - Ajit Balakrishnan, Business Standard
If you have been wondering for a while why your son or niece has been curled up with a Chetan Bhagat novel when you’d rather have them read Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, this article is for you. Mr Bhagat is the author of five novels. According to Nielsen, the official scorekeeper of book sales, these five novels sell over half a million copies a year in India, a market in which sales of 10,000 copies...
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Israeli makes bicycle from cardboard - Sowetan Live
At first glance the bicycle looks like it was transferred one-to-one from a crude computer graphics programme into real life. Its frame, spokes and pedals are a stark white colour and don’t look particularly elegant. Only the black rubber tyres and the brown saddle contrast with the rest of the bike. Sitting on the bike is Ishar Gafni, a 50-year-old product designer...
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Making the Season go round - Sharada Ramanathan, Hindu
The Madras Margazhi festival is a phenomenon not merely because it is arguably the biggest music festival in the world, packing in over 3,000 concerts in over 300 sabha-s in less than 30 days. Even more significant is the fact that it has, at its epicentre, just one manifestation of Indian culture, Carnatic music. And with each passing year, the festival has grown from strength to strength...
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A trip to India on a time machine - Soma Das, Financial Express
Making sense of time-space continuum and trying to unearth patterns in it has been one of the oldest obsessions of knowledge seekers. What ‘time’ has been for historians, ‘space’ has been for geographers. Traditionally, the spatial dimension assume supreme importance for geographers, which they interrogate over time in terms of physical and cultural landscapes.
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Haryana's Harappan town was larger than Mohenjo Daro - Rudraneil Sengupta, Mint
Wazir Chand Saroae is a slight, nearsighted man with a shuffling gait, the go-to man when electrical appliances in the village need fixing. His house is like any other here—compact, two-storeyed, neat. There are no signs at all to suggest that in a small room on the first floor of this house, Saroae is sitting on a treasure trove that is both priceless and timeless.
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Holy Kumbh! - Sourish Bhattacharyya, Mail Today
It was Mark Twain who first expressed the sense of wonderment that generations of writers and journalists have felt after participating in what is now billed as the greatest spiritual spectacle on earth. "It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such incredible journeys...
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They police old Jerusalem, feel could’ve handled Mumbai too - Amitabh Sinha, Indian Express
“We are not trying to boast but if something like the Mumbai attacks had happened here, it would have been over in a few hours,” says Nicky Rosenfeld, spokesperson for the Israeli national police, about the 2008 terrorist strikes that had continued for more than 60 hours before the 10 terrorists had been killed or overpowered.
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2013: From smarter TVs to Internet-controlled everything - Walter S Mossberg, WSJ
Personal technology never stops changing. Some new products and services are game changers, like Apple's iPhone and iPad. Others are clever twists or refinements, like each successive version of Google's Android platform, which gets better and better. Others are bold gambles, like Microsoft's new Windows 8, which hopes to combine both a tablet experience...
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Putin offers passport to actor Depardieu, who fled France over taxes - Ben Brumfield, CNN
French actor Gerard Depardieu is known to U.S. movie fans for his starring role in the 1990 comedy "Green Card," in which the character he plays marries an American woman -- played by Andie MacDowell -- to be allowed permanent residence in the States. Depardieu may never become a documented immigrant in the US...
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Here's how Obama's autopen works - Alex Fitzpatrick, Mashable
Call it the ultimate in telecommuting: When President Barack Obama signed Congress' fiscal cliff deal into law Wednesday evening, he was on vacation in Hawaii, approximately 4800 miles from Washington, DC. How did he manage the feat? By using what's called an "autopen" -- a nifty piece of technology that copies a user's pen strokes...
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On the banks of the Sangam - Prashant Pandey, Indian Express
Sangam has its regular visitors, the winged Siberian variety that flock to the river every winter, hovering low over the chilled waters, flapping their wet wings. But this year, as Allahabad hosts the Kumbh—what the Guinness World Records calls the “largest-ever gathering of human beings for a single purpose”—the birds will have to share their territory. Visitors to the mela will squeeze into every inch of the city’s space...
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Kashi Vishwanath temple will get a golden makeover - Sunday Guardian
Devotees visiting the historic Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi will no longer have to jostle for space when they walk through the narrow lanes that lead to the temple. The religious endowment department of the Uttar Pradesh government has decided to give the famous temple a makeover, which includes cleaning and widening the lanes...
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President joins PMs in journey of rediscovery to Bihar - Santosh Singh, Indian Express
For Mauritius President Rajkeswur Puryag, who wept like a child on Sunday after he reached his ancestral village of Bajeetpur in Bihar, the arrival had been made possible by genealogists whom he had contacted to help trace his roots. Puryag had tried himself 25 years ago, but failed. His hopes revived when the process of tracing one’s roots started to become a coordinated...
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How Gujaratis changed corner shop biz in UK - Sudeshna Sen, Economic Times
They were called the Rockefellers of Uganda. They dined with presidents and wined with kings. But when mad dictator Idi Amin took power in Uganda, Manubhai Madhvani, the doyen of one of Africa's biggest industrial empires was thrown into a high-security prison, dependent on his family's high-level connections for smuggled vegetarian food.
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There's an Indian connection in 4 films with 36 Oscar nominations - Times of India
India is making its presence felt at the Oscars with four of the films with the highest number of nominations having a connection to the country, and Chennai-based classical Carnatic music vocalist Jayashri Ramnath being nominated for writing the Tamil song 'Pi's Lullaby' for director Ang Lee's 'Life of Pi'. Ramnath, known on the concert circuit...
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Rough cut - Jason Miklian, Foreign Policy
The Gujarat Mail is just another red-eye train. Twelve powder-blue passenger cars crisscrossing, like so many hundreds of others, India's northwestern breadbasket through the dark of night. At five minutes past two, the Mail begins its four-hour journey, lumbering south from Surat to Mumbai. Inside, the third-class cabins are equal parts scurrying roaches and dangling unwashed feet...
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Manu's children - Indira Kannan, Business Standard
As Tulsi Gabbard, the new Congresswoman from Hawaii, was sworn into the House of Representatives by Speaker John Boehner in Washington, DC on January 3, she repeated the oath of office voiced by hundreds of lawmakers before her over the years. But she was the first to do so with her left hand on a copy of the Bhagwadgita. The irony did not escape anyone: the first Hindu American...
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The magic of India's Kumbh Mela - Mark Tully, BBC
India is a land of spectacles, it is a land of teeming millions and a land of an ancient culture and civilisation. In my long years in India I have seen many spectacles but none so remarkable as the two Maha or Great Kumbh Melas which I attended. I have seen vast crowds assemble but none as big as the millions who flocked to the north Indian city of Allahabad to bathe at the confluence where the cloudy waters of the river...
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A feel of Chennai for Harvard Biz School grads - Swetha Kannan, Hindu
“We have been hearing so much about India’s growth story in the US press. To actually experience it firsthand has been a remarkable experience,” gushes Lindsay Hyde. The 30-year-old is among the 42 students from Harvard Business School (HBS) in Chennai now, as part of a FIELD (Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development)...
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Inside the wild, wacky, profitable world of boing boing - Rob Walker, FastCompany
Back in 1999, Mark Frauenfelder wrote an article about new web tools that made it easier to do something called "blogging." His editors at the technology magazine The Industry Standard declined to publish it, concluding that blogging didn't really seem like a very big deal. Turns out it was. It's certainly been a very good thing for Frauenfelder...
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Art in step with time - Times of India
For long,this black steel wedge filled with golden arabesque shapes has been a mystery to motorists using the Barapullah Flyover. But now that a signboard is up at the site and an organization devoted to popularizing science has done an event here , people have started realizing that this is no whimsical installation but the arm (the technical name is gnomon ) of a giant sundial. One that really, and correctly, tells...
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Kumbh mystique now draws Harvard dons - Praveen Dass, Times of India
Besides the millions of pilgrims, ash-smeared ascetics, doe-eyed starlets and wide-eyed tourists that usually flock to the Mahakumbh Mela in Allahabad, there is a new class of visitors the religious gathering has attracted this year: academics and students from Harvard University. Intrigued by the sheer scale and complex dynamics of the mela, a group of top Harvard dons...
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Uganda to UK: A long journey - Dipankar De Sarkar, Hindustan Times
In the year Priti Patel was born in London, the then Ugandan dictator Idi Amin informed his nation that God had instructed him (in a dream) to expel Ugandan Asians. Later he called the thriving trading community “bloodsuckers” and gave them three months to leave — those with British passports first, then the rest. In all, 60,000 Asians fled Uganda, around 28,000 of whom settled in a cold and grey Britain...
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Vatican’s secret empire - Hindustan Times
Few passing London tourists would ever guess that the premises of Bulgari, the upmarket jewellers in New Bond Street, had anything to do with the pope. Nor indeed the nearby headquarters of the wealthy investment bank Altium Capital, on the corner of St James’s Square and Pall Mall. But these office blocks in one of London’s most expensive districts are part of a surprising secret commercial property...
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Auto driver's girl tops CA exams - Mail Today
Financial obstacles cannot stop you from fulfiling your dreams, as 24-year-old Prema Jayakumar, the daughter of an auto-rickshaw driver, proved when she secured the first rank in the All India Chartered Accountancy examination. Prema became a role model for lakhs of girls her age when she conquered all odds to achieve her goal. For Prema, education was not just another chore but a way to change her life for better.
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Get bookmarked, Jaipur lit fest opens today - William Dalrymple, Hindustan Times
The Jaipur Literature Festival is a unique celebration of writing that has grown into something bigger and more wonderful to anything we could ever have hoped when we first conceived this festival eight years ago. From only 14 guests turning up in 2005, most of whom were tourists who took the wrong turn, in 2006 we had a big enough crowd nearly to fill...
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Shane Warne: The wizard of Oz - Aabhas Sharma, Business Standard
Anyone who has followed cricket writing in the last 15 years would testify that Gideon Haigh is one of the finest writers around. Not only does Mr Haigh understand the nuances of the sport better than most writers, but it is his analysis that puts him above his peers. Similarly, most cricket fans would acknowledge that Shane Warne was perhaps the greatest spinner of all time. Muttiah Muralitharan might have...
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Indian TV soaps become serial hits across the world - Nandini Raghavendra, Economic Times
Indian soaps are working up more lather than ever in foreign countries, with television viewers from Serbia to Kenya lapping up typically domestic fare such as BalikaVadhu and Uttaran, opening up newer markets for the producers. The actors playing the parts of Anandi and the duo of Tapasya and Ichcha in these television serials are fast becoming...
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Five days and five Kritis - Charumathi Ramachandran, Hindu
The December Music and Dance Season is over and Pongal has been celebrated. It is time once again to pay homage on Bahula Panchami Day, the day when Saint Tyagaraja left Tiruvaiyaru for ever to join his ishta devatha, Lord Rama. In fact, a joke used to do the rounds a few years ago, that while buses and cars were plying full to Tiruvaiyaru, one bus carried a lone, troubled-looking man travelling...
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The board game theory of life - Shoba Narayan, Mint
It is a simple game involving five pebbles of medium size. We called it Anchangal (five stones), but it could well have been played with 10 or 11 stones. It took a little practice and there was scope for improvement. You started by throwing one pebble up in the air and picked up another pebble while it fell. Then you graduated to picking up two pebbles while one was in the air; then three and more.
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This is rye humour - Karan Thapar, Hindustan Times
Which is correct: whisky or whiskey? Actually, it depends upon what you're talking about. Whisky comes from Scotland. When it's made anywhere else, be it nearby Ireland or far away Japan, it's spelt whiskey. And as for the stuff they drink in America - Bourbon or Rye - that's very definitely whiskey. However, Winston Churchill's delightful commentary on this product applies no matter how you spell it.
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Test-tube data - Economist
Like all the best ideas, this one was born in a pub. Nick Goldman and Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) near Cambridge, were pondering what they could do with the torrent of genomic data their research group generates, all of which has to be archived. The volume of data is growing faster than the capacity of the hard drives used to hold it. “That means the cost of storage is rising...
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Beneath burqa, a mangalsutra and chooda - Maria Akram, Times of India
As burqa-clad Sumaira walks past the streets of Jama Masjid, there's nothing really striking about her. That's until she flashes the bright red bangles she's wearing — the kind that newly married Hindu women have around their wrists. Young Muslim women in India, and even Pakistan, can be increasingly seen sporting the chooda, mangalsutra...
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Documentary photography as a fine art - Dinesh Khanna, Hindu
Steve McCurry is obviously asked by a lot of people how they can become a photographer. And in reply his advice is never about cameras or lenses or technique. He says, “If you want to be a Photographer, first leave home.” And if there is one photographer on earth who has taken his advice really seriously, it’s Steve McCurry himself.
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A white rocket rose from the water - Pallava Bagla, Outlook
On January 27, a balmy Sunday, when all of India was soaking in the last of an extended weekend, somewhere in the Bay of Bengal, some 200 scientists, working in small teams on a flotilla of ships, coordinated their expertise to launch a missile in complete secrecy. After they reported an elated success at 1:40 pm, India announced for the first time...
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A tiny computer and a million tinkerers - John Biggs, NYT
Raspberry Pi may sound like the name of a math-based dessert. But it is actually one of the hottest and cheapest little computers in the world right now. Almost one million of these $35 machines have shipped since last February, capturing the imaginations of educators, hobbyists and tinkerers around the world. The story of the Raspberry Pi begins in 2006 when Eben Upton...
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Beijing sways to Bharatanatyam - Ananth Krishnan, Hindu
On a recent snowy Sunday, the walls of a nondescript apartment complex in a Beijing suburb reverberated with a steady rhythm. In a small exercise room, 14 young Chinese students stomped their feet on the cold wooden floorboards, as their teacher, sitting upright and cross-legged, clapped her hands to produce a quick beat. A typical scene, perhaps, in any Beijing arts school. This, however, is a Chinese dancing...
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Dirty Hands gives life to reel characters - Sohini Das, Business Standard
In a scene from his coming film Michael, the character played by Naseeruddin Shah is hit by a tram while walking on a road in Kolkata. His body is flung into the air, before landing on the roadside. The scene is amazingly life-like. What breathes life into the scene is a mannequin built by a team of silicone mannequin makers from Ahmedabad.
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Cattle cloning: Part science, part art. No sex please - Jacob P Koshy, Mint
Sex is an expensive waste of time at the National Dairy Research Institute. None in the herds of virile buffalo and well-hoofed cows, several of whom have close genetic links with prime Dutch and Swiss cattle, have been born of so-called natural service, as the sexual act is quaintly described by stoic scientists. “Natural service is too costly and quite unsuitable...
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Grabbing a quick bite of a tasty market - N Ramakrishnan, Business Line
All of them quit well-paying jobs and smelt an opportunity in food. They set up what are known as QSRs, short for quick service restaurants, or more commonly known as fast-food joints. There are scores of others who have made food their business. It is a sector that attracts investors too, as they see a growing number of people eating out and on the move.
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Message on a Chapati - Sagar Malviya, Economic Times
At Kumbh Mela, the largest congregation on earth where all big marketers are vying to sell their wares and boost their brands, one promotion that stands out is Hindustan Unilever's 'Roti Reminder' for its Lifebuoy soap brand. The country's largest consumer products firm, along with creative agency Ogilvy, has partnered more than 100 dhabas and hotels at the mela site to serve rotis that are stamped...
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Global Indians - Manoj Joshi, Mail Today
IN 2005, the prime minister’s daughter got married. The event took place with the participation and blessings of the parents. Indeed, most of the Capital’s glitterati was not even aware of it, leave alone invited. Characteristic of his style, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh held his daughter Amrit’s wedding at a friend’s residence and instead of the hype attached to VIP events, this was a quiet family affair.
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Life in a Metro - Jyoti Mukul, Business Standard
The year was 1999. The venue was Khyber Pass in north Delhi, named after the pass that connects Pakistan and Afghanistan. Delhi Metro Rail Corporation Deputy Chief Engineer Daljeet Singh was taking charge of a piece of land where trucks used to be parked. The truckers were angry. Some of them tried to set his car ablaze. In hindsight, it was a minor hiccup. Fourteen years later, Delhi Metro is all set to roll into Greater...
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In Chinese buildings, a copycat craze - Bianca Bosker, WSJ
In Beijing, the new Wangjing SOHO complex, a trio of curvy office buildings designed by the internationally acclaimed architect Zaha Hadid, is slowly rising in the smog-filled skyline. Meanwhile, 1,000 miles south, a set of two buildings is going up—and the design looks just like Ms. Hadid's, say the backers of the Beijing complex. The other development company...
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Thailand, the TV land - Rajiv Makhni, Hindustan Times
Buying a flat screen TV in Thailand requires a full 24 hours of dedication. But it’s really worth it. It was like a procession. An impossibly long line of very boisterous people, each speaking extremely loudly and very excitedly and each – and let me repeat that word, EACH had a 32-inch Samsung or Sony LED TV propped up on the baggage trolley. This was the line for checking in to the Thai Airways flight back to Delhi...
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Rise of the Drones - Lev Grossman, Time
A few months ago I borrowed a drone from a company called Parrot. Officially the drone is called an AR.Drone 2.0, but for simplicity's sake, we're just going to call it the Parrot. The Parrot went on sale last May and retails for about $300. It's a quadcopter, meaning it's a miniature helicopter with four rotors; basically it looks like a giant four-leaf clover designed by Darth Vader. It's noisy and a bit fussy: it spits error messages...
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Kumbh’s lap of luxury - Man Mohan Rai and Ravi Teja Sharma, Economic Times
Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, the high priestess of haute couture, once famously remarked that the opposite of luxury was not poverty, but vulgarity. Chances are that she wouldn't have nurtured any second thoughts in picking up one of those uber-rich tour packages had she been alive to attend the Maha Kumbh 2013, an event where the poorest of the poor joins the mighty...
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From Kerala to Karachi - Thulasi Kakkat, Hindu
For more than a century, betel leaves from Tirur in Kerala have beenmuch in demand in the paan mandis of Pakistan. But rising train fares,Indo-Pak tensions and the demand for paan masala have seenthese paan mandis reduced to memories. Mustafa, 57, a betel farmer in Tirur, steps into the fields every morning with a prayer that the friendship between India and Pakistan should last and grow.
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Fireball meteor rattles Siberia, 1,200 hurt - Ellen Barry & Andrew E Kramer, Business Standard
Gym class came to a halt inside the Chelyabinsk Railway Institute, and students gathered around the window, gazing at the fat white contrail that arced its way across the morning sky. A missile? A comet? A few quiet moments passed. And then, with incredible force, the windows blew in. The scenes from Chelyabinsk...
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Pulling new strings - Anjana Rajan, Hindu
“From Rikhi Ramji to Sanjay… I want to help propagate this tradition,” says Sanjay Sharma, grandson of the legendary instrument maker Rikhi Ram, whose name at one time spelt perfection in pitch, tonal quality and craftsmanship of every kind related to instrument making. Sharma, who spearheads an NGO called Sanjay Rikhi Ram Vadya Parampara and also retails instruments and musical aids...
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26 years ago, real special 26 shamed police & state - Vikram Doctor, Economic Times
On the afternoon of March 19, 1987, Arvind Inamdar received an urgent phone call at his office at the Police Headquarters in Mumbai. Inamdar would retire in 2000 as director-general of police for Maharashtra, but he was in the crime division then and this call was about something odd happening in Opera House where the city's most exclusive jewellery stores...
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Can Vidya Balan do an M.S. Subbulakshmi? - Shoba Narayan, Mint
So Vidya Balan will play M.S. Subbulakshmi in Rajiv Menon’s biopic of the Carnatic legend? This is exciting news for Chennai’s music lovers. Chennai wakes up to M.S., as she is called. Her rendition of the Suprabhatam and Vishnu Sahasranamam (1,000 names of Vishnu) still remain the versions that are played at south Indian homes and temples in the morning.
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I used Google Glass: the future, but with monthly updates - Joshua Topolsky, Verge
The frosted-glass doors on the 11th floor of Google’s NYC headquarters part and a woman steps forward to greet me. This is an otherwise normal specimen of humanity. Normal height, slender build; her eyes are bright, inquisitive. She leans in to shake my hand and at that moment I become acutely aware of the device she’s wearing in the place you would expect eyeglasses...
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Pamban bridge is 100 and still going strong - DJ Walter Scott, Hindu
The Pamban rail bridge, an engineering marvel and India’s first cantilever bridge stepped into its centenary year on Sunday. The 2.06 km long bridge, the second longest sea bridge after Bandra-Worli sea link was thrown open to traffic this day in 1914 and is still going strong, providing the much needed rail connectivity to the pilgrim centre of Rameswaram.
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Local flavour wins over the world - Soumen Mukherjee, Pioneer
Among the neo-classical dances, the mask dance of eastern India Chhau is inimitable. The convoluted façades, the glittering ensembles of the performers, the cadenced thumping of the drums and the mellifluous tones of the sanai, have made Chhau popular not only in India but the world over. In Chhau repertoire there are several dance numbers which are based on episodes from the Mahabharat...
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The Queen of Indian food - Vir Sanghvi, Hindustan Times
I was at a party last weekend to celebrate Camellia Panjabi’s MBE (a British award that is roughly equal to our Padma Shri), presented to her earlier in the day at a ceremony at the Delhi High Commission. The party itself was at the Taj Mahal Hotel and was attended by many of Camellia’s old friends and colleagues (Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Martand Singh, Rakesh Thakore, Bim Bissell, Ishaat Hussain...
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Mother Teresa saint of the media: Study - Kounteya Sinha, Times of India
A study conducted by Canadian researchers has called Mother Teresa "anything but a saint", a creation of an orchestrated and effective media campaign who was generous with her prayers but miserly with her foundation's millions when it came to humanity's suffering. The controversial study, to be published this month in the journal of studies...
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Freedom song - Ananda Banerjee, Mint
Ever wondered where the word “butterfly” originated from? Did you know that moths are responsible for pollinating most flowers above the tree line on the southern face of the Himalayas? Are you intrigued by life in the undergrowth? If you are, then this might be the book you are looking for. Peter Smetacek, an authority on Indian butterflies and moths, engages us with the mysterious world of elusive insects...
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'The Family' matters…. - Shobhaa De, Times of India
We Indians are very family minded. The whole world knows that. We love our families. Karan Johar told us to. And made a fortune based on that sweet and simple emotion. Others have also realized the value of family ties in the lives of desis. They too want to make a fortune out of them. What's wrong with that? The Great Indian Family represents many things to many people.
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In New Delhi, even seedy real estate goes for 8 figures - Jim Yardley, NYT
The fading bungalow at 38 Amrita Shergil Marg does not immediately shout real estate bling. There is no tennis court, no infinity pool, no Sub-Zero refrigerator or walk-in closet. The paint is chipped, the bathrooms are musty and the ceilings have water stains. The house may ultimately be torn down. Yet when it went up for public auction, the winning bid was almost...
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The Pope and the spy who loved him - Sean Flynn, GQ
The butler did it! That was the tabloid take on the unprecedented breach of security that shook the Vatican last year, when a trove of secrets plucked from one of the most impenetrable places on earth—the pope's private quarters—was leaked to the media. But why did he do it? And did he act alone? Sean Flynn digs around the Vatican's strange, cloistered world...
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The farming technique that could revolutionize the way we eat - Roman Gaus, Atlantic
On an early June morning in 2010, I stood outside the Aquaponics research facility at the University of Applied Sciences, perched on a green hilltop in Wädenswil, Switzerland, 20 minutes outside Zurich. The lab director, Andreas Graber, had finally given in to my persistent calls requesting a visit. Graber, Switzerland’s most prolific aquaponics researcher...
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The one-month wives: Hyderabad's bride bazaar - Sreenivas Janyala, Indian Express
Osama Ibrahim arrived in Hyderabad a month ago with very specific requirements: he wanted to marry a girl below 20; he would pay Rs 1 lakh to her family as bride price; the marriage would last a month; and that he would leave the country after a divorce. The 44-year-old Sudanese engineer, who has a wife and two children back home, had no problem finding...
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Kumbh: The pop up city - Anthony Acciavatti, Indian Express
Every twelfth year, the sleepy university town of Allahabad is transformed into a colossal tent city populated by millions of pilgrims. And it all seems to happen so fast. The waters of the Ganga and Yamuna slowly recede after the monsoon. A city grid is tattooed into the banks and shoals at the Sangam. Tents and temples pop up in October. Pontoon bridges stretch from one bank of the Ganga...
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Seeking brand Salvation - Anushree Bhattacharyya, Financial Express
It's a once in a 12-year opportunity to talk to 100 million consumers at once, and marketers are making the best of this opportunity. While the on-going Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad is a route to salvation for many as they come to pray and take a dip in the holy waters of the Ganga, it is also a haven for marketers as brands get an opportunity to talk to consumers. Taking the cue, the country's biggest FMCG...
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Fashion label to 'yogi': Donna Karan on an Indian holiday - Namrata Zakaria, Indian Express
When you spot her chanting 'Aum Namah Shivaya' with almost six lakh others, dressed in a South Indian silk sari, hair rolled up in a neat bun with jasmine, you would hardly believe this is the woman whose fashion empire pretty much runs the American retail industry. This is Donna Karan, who along with Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, makes the holy trinity...
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Dark days in Tamil Nadu - S Bridget Leena & Arundhati Ramanathan, Mint
Bangalore-based finance professional Lakshminarayana KR was scrambling to book a flight to Coimbatore for his family to attend the funeral of his maternal uncle, who died at the age of 72. As it turned out, the family didn’t need to catch that flight. The final rites of his uncle, who lived alone and died suddenly at 8:30am on one January day, had to be performed in a hurry before the scheduled power cut...
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The Indian-origin noodle seller who became a billionaire - NDTV
Run by Maoist revolutionaries and plagued by poverty, Nepal is not the most obvious place to make big bucks. But Binod Chaudhary, the country's first billionaire, sees no reason why his breakthrough shouldn't inspire other success stories. "I am proof to the younger generation that you can accomplish things here," Chaudhary told AFP as he surveyed...
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When the Pope is the problem - NewIndianExpress
Religion and power beget scandal. The papacy is no exception. Much before the black smoke over the Sistine Chapel kept informing the world about the status of the new pope’s election, Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation was clouded with controversy. Ever since Benedict XVI—who once belonged to Nazi youth brigade—took over as the pope, he had to deal with troubles. His views on contraception...
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The touch-screen generation - Hanna Rosin, Atlantic
On a chilly day last spring, a few dozen developers of children’s apps for phones and tablets gathered at an old beach resort in Monterey, California, to show off their games. One developer, a self-described “visionary for puzzles” who looked like a skateboarder-recently-turned-dad, displayed a jacked-up, interactive game called Puzzingo, intended for toddlers and inspired by his own son’s desire to build...
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Thalaivar Dhoni and Namma Virat - Bharat Sundaresan, Indian Express
Laxmipathy Balaji is an out-and-out Chennai boy. From having grown up watching first-day- first-shows of Rajinikanth movies to swearing by traditional Tamil meals served on a plantain leaf, Balaji has always worn his city's pride on his sleeve. And for the first three editions of the Indian Premier League, Balaji donned the Super Kings' canary jersey too with great passion.
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Taking Indian music to US classrooms - Hindu
When more than 1,000 school students at the Middleton School District in the United States perform hardcore Carnatic ragas such as Bangala and Nattai with ease, you know Indian classical music has gone truly global. The performance was part of a recent initiative by Chennai-based Chitravina maestro N. Ravikiran, now touring the U.S. The artiste...
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Raja without a crown - Krishnadas Rajagopal, Hindu
“Do you have a crown?” a boy asked Puthiya Kovilakathu Sree Manavedan Raja, the Zamorin of Calicut, during an interview in 2011 for a school magazine. “No. My ancestors had a crown. I’m a Raja without a crown,” he replied. That reply defined Kunhianiyan, as he was lovingly referred to. He died on Wednesday in a hospital here, barely a week after completing 100 years on March 22.
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36 hours in Bangalore, India - Erica Westly, NYT
Many tourists who find themselves in Bangalore, India’s third-largest city, are merely on their way to somewhere else: Goa, for instance, or Kerala. But there is reason to linger in this lively city of some nine and a half million people. As the capital of the State of Karnataka and India’s information technology hub, Bangalore has lots to offer: lush parks and gardens, a remarkably diverse restaurant scene...
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Once upon a time in Madurai - K Latha, Indian Express
It is heartening to see a sustained interest in English translations of Tamil classical poetry, when the readership of poetry itself is claimed to be dwindling. In the last two or three years alone, there have been at least four to five major translations. They have triggered discussions, even heated arguments about their relative merits, in literary and academic circles. One wonders, then, what in these poems...
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It's show time again - Boria Majumdar, Times of India
It is IPL time once more — seven weeks of drama that will make for compulsive viewing across the country and the cricket-playing world at large. The question that we are likely to grapple with at the start of the tournament is: Does the IPL retain the same charm? With tournaments like the Big Bash and the Bangladesh Premier League popping up and occupying significant chunks of the cricket calendar...
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An Indian races to the moon - Devangshu Datta, Business Standard
In the bureaucratic universe, projects going over schedule are the norm rather than the exception. But in the physical universe, astronomical bodies keep to rigid timetables and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has to meet one of those immutable deadlines. ISRO is scrambling to ensure that its Mangalayaan mission, which will put a spacecraft in orbit around Mars...
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Rolling Kal strikes gold - Rasheeda Bhagat, Business Line
I am mad at Kal Raman — he’s kept me waiting for 45 minutes. I threaten to leave, but don’t because he has a great story to tell — a textbook rags-to-riches tale. When he finally arrives, I mention punctuality, but he is sufficiently, and smartly, contrite. He isn’t feeling too well, and so on. In two minutes, I can see why the man who couldn’t “even say ‘My name is Kalyan Raman in English without shivering’”...
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The Marwari business model-II - Harish Damodaran, Business Line
The Marwaris represent the only business community one would truly call pan-Indian. For a cluster of Bania/Jain merchant castes originally from the Marwar (Jodhpur), Bikaner and Shekhawati desert tracts of Rajasthan, their sinking roots into the business landscape covering virtually the whole of the country is a remarkable phenomenon. Till around the 16th century... The Marwari business model-I
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Jasuben Pizza: Success story of Gujarati enterprise? - Partha Ghosh, Economic Times
In Narendra Modi's Gujarat, the pizza is certainly not Italian. Enterprising Gujarati entrepreneurs have converted the oven-baked, flat, round bread, which took birth in Naples, into a desi delight. It has a crunchy and biscuit-like crust, is laced with sweet tomato puree (no seasoning, just black pepper to flavour it), and has a humble topping of finely chopped onions...
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Thatcher, Chandraswami and I - K Natwar Singh, Hindu
India House is among the better known diplomatic establishments in London. I first set eyes on the imposing building in 1952, when I was a student at Cambridge University. Thirty years later I entered India House as Deputy High Commissioner. One of my less attractive duties was to meet the unreasonable demands of visitors from India. Not all were disagreeable but many were.
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At Nalanda, science first met spirituality - Claude Arpi, Pioneer
Recently, I had the chance to listen to a long talk by the Dalai Lama. I was surprised as he repeatedly said that there is no such thing as ‘Tibetan Buddhism’, even less ‘Lamaism’. The so-called ‘Tibetan Buddhism’, he said, has entirely been borrowed from India, more precisely from Nalanda. In recent times, the name of the ancient university has been in the news...
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The happy marriage of technology and tradition - Gowri Ramnarayan, DNA
Technology and tradition. Uneasy partners? Enter the world of Carnatic music, Chennai, and see their happy, happy marriage. For Indian musicians, earning dollars-pounds-euros through intercontinental Skype teaching is the obvious gain. But the hi-tech skills of present-day Carnatic musicians have also reduced the menacing colossus of yesterday — the reviewer/critic...
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One up on Einstein - Paromita Chakrabarti, Indian Express
Is their child exceptionally gifted or is she just a cut above the rest? When UK-based Neha Ramu, 12, took the Mensa test (an association of people with high IQ with branches across the world) in February this year, it finally ended the suspense for her ophthalmologist parents Ramu Muniraju and Jayashree. Neha achieved a score of 162 on the IQ test — the highest score possible for someone under 18 years...
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God of small things - Sweta Goswami, Pioneer
For hundreds of Pakistani nationals who migrated to India in search of a better life, 60-year-old Nahar Singh has come as a saviour. Singh has given shelter to around 625 Pakistani Hindus in his two-storey residence at Bijwasan in the national Capital. Singh accommodated the victims from across Pakistan in his house, which used to bring him Rs70,000 per month from rent.
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Life’s about living healthier, not longer - Sanchita Sharma, Hindustan Times
You may have heard it, the story about Stamatis Moraitis, the Greek who moved to the US in 1943 from his home in the island of Ikaria in the Aegean Sea. In 1976, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and given nine months to live. When nine other doctors confirmed the diagnosis, he refused to get treated and went home to Greece to die. But he didn’t.
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Garam Masala: Explosive vessels - Vikram Doctor, Economic Times
The news that the bombs used to target the Boston Marathon were made from pressure cookers will come as sadly familiar news in India. Pressure cookers may not be that common in the USA, but they are in India, and unfortunately the perverse desire to turn them into instruments of destruction and terror is well known to us too. This piece was written in 2006 and looks at our history with pressure cookers...
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South African cricket's star is a performance analyst from India - Bharat Sundaresan, Indian Express
Till last year, despite his association with the South African team, Prasanna Agoram was just one of the numerous inconspicuous video analysts in IPL. Times have changed for the 37-year-old in the Royal Challengers Bangalore corner. Prasanna is now an integral part of the support staff that has led the Proteas to the top of the Test rankings.
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Coffee and the selfish gene - D Balasubramanian, Hindu
How did coffee become more popular in south India and tea in the north? History appears to give the reason. Legend has it that in the late 16th century while Haji Baba Budan was returning from Haj through Yemen, he found people boiling coffee beans in water and enjoying the “decoction”. He then smuggled a handful of the (forbidden to export) beans with him and planted them on the Chikamagalur...
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Mango nation - Mint
The International Mango Festival, which has been organized by Delhi Tourism every June since 1987, showcases traditional and hybrid mangoes—from the famous Alphonso to the little-known Benishan. There are quizzes, competitions, folk performances and children’s shows, along with processed mango items for purchase. The tentative dates for the festival this year are 28-30 June.
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The future of the car: Clean, safe and it drives itself - Economist
Some inventions, like some species, seem to make periodic leaps in progress. The car is one of them. Twenty-five years elapsed between Karl Benz beginning small-scale production of his original Motorwagen and the breakthrough, by Henry Ford and his engineers in 1913, that turned the car into the ubiquitous, mass-market item that has defined the modern urban landscape.
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Tamil Nadu flush with pride - Somya Sethuraman, Hindu
In December 2011, the Government of Tamil Nadu declared that it would take steps to provide safe sanitation to all its residents by 2015. This ambitious goal led to sanitation being recognised as a priority “State” issue. In pursuit of improving sanitation services, a multidisciplinary team was formed to look into various aspects of urban sanitation. The lessons learnt in the early stages of this exercise...
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Kota’s coaching ecosystem - Sudhanshu Mishra, Mail Today
ANAMIKA Rai left her job as UNICEF’s district mobilisation co- ordinator in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras in 2011 to be with her son Vishvesh, who had joined Bansal Classes in Kota to prepare for IIT- JEE ( Joint entrance Examination). Reason: Vishvesh was missing homemade food. After landing in Kota she opened a mess in a double- storey house and became an entrepreneur.
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A home away from home - Raksha Kumar, Hindu
The first time Sophie Judah became aware of her Jewish identity was when she was 14 and her uncle gifted her a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank. “Since then,” she says, “I have read it seven times, and have read (Leon Uris’s novel) Exodus 10 times.” Sophie, who was born in Pune, is 56 now and lives with her husband and five children in Israel. I heard about Sophie by accident. Some time back...
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100 years of excess, a billion dreams - Shiv Visvanathan, Asian Age
At a time of electoral anxiety and economic angst, good news is rare. And good news which has a historical quality, a vintage depth and archaeology of gossip is even rarer. Yet, in the middle of all the scandals playing themselves out as B- and C-grade movies, one event stands out, loved by all and celebrated by all. As the Indian cinema celebrates its 100th anniversary this year...
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Panchayats take first steps towards digital empowerment - Anuja, Mint
Sometime last year, Surendra Singh got a call from a military outpost in Srinagar. The soldier had an urgent inquiry for the 31-year-old sarpanch of Chandana, a village in Haryana’s Kaithal district. The man, who hailed from the village, had lost his voter ID card and needed a letter from the panchayat attesting that he was indeed a resident of Chandana.
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Robodiptera - Economist
Some people are convinced they are already out there: swarms of tiny flying drones discreetly surveying the world on behalf of their shadowy masters. In 2007 anti-war protesters in America claimed they were being watched by small hovering craft that looked like dragonflies. Officials maintained they really were dragonflies. Whatever the truth, robotic flies actually are now getting airborne.
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Capital gain - Bhupesh Bhandari & Ramveer Singh Gurjar, Business Standard
Pushcarts, rickshaws, two-wheelers, cars, men and animals vie for space on the road. Wires hang from poles like threads from a fakir's neck. Commerce thrives amidst the chaos; clothes, cheap cell phones, jewellery, food, shoes - everything sells here. This is Chandni Chowk, once the pride of Delhi but now cramped and unfashionable.
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Indian historical linguistics - Economist
It is rare that Johnson is compelled to respond to comments. But my last post, about the fun parallels in the hybrid development of English and Dravidian languages, seems to have stirred the passions of our readers. Many of them commented, dismissing the post as (at best) misguided and (at worst) a piece of neocolonial rubbish. That is a shame. Studying the history of India’s...
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An 18-year-old wunderkind named top graduating senior - Sarah Yang, UC Berkeley
How does an undergraduate top off a whirlwind tenure at the University of California, Berkeley, highlighted by experiments with nanowires and biofuels, brainstorming sessions with corporate executives, poetry readings meant to engender political activism, and educational outreach to students using modern technology?
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The immensity of India - Adam Roberts, Times of India
Being a foreign writer in India may just be the best job in the world. As The Economist's South Asia correspondent, my brief is broad — and India is generous back to me. Free to potter in distant corners, i get to tell the world what i see going on. Outsiders have a great appetite to know. Nearly three years into my posting, four experiences strike me. The first, a rail journey...
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Gatsby's heartbreaker - Christopher Stevens, Mail Today
She was a society girl with a diamond-hard heart and a voice like sweet music. He was a cocky, witty student, with almost feminine looks and no money at all. Their love affair never had a chance — but it inspired America’s greatest romantic novel and now a new film tipped to sweep every awards ceremony: The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald never stopped worshipping Ginevra King, his first love.
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Newspaper vendor from Bangalore walks into IIM-Calcutta - Sruthy Susan Ullas, Times of India
As the alarm goes off at 4am, N Shiva Kumar is up on his feet, stacking his bicycle with newspapers. He has to deliver them before the sun appears on the horizon. A habit since Class 6, Shiva's life is set to change now. Come June 16, this newspaper-boy-turned-vendor will walk down the corridors of the Indian Institute of Management-Calcutta as a PGP student.
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90-yr-old’s 1 lakh books in Karnataka a global hit - Riddhi Doshi, Hindustan Times
Atop an idyllic green hill overlooking Gokarna beach in Karnataka, a 90-year-old priest and former theatre costume designer carefully dusts the 30 bookcases and assorted boxes that house his collection of 1 lakh religious and secular texts. It’s a library that Ganapathy Vedeshwar has painstakingly built up over 74 years, from one small shelf to a 5,000-sq-ft building...
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Train through Pakistan - Declan Walsh, New York Times
Resplendent in his gleaming white uniform and peaked cap, the stationmaster stood at the platform, waiting for a train that would never come. "Cutbacks," Nisar Ahmed Abro said with a resigned shrug. Ruk Station, in the centre of Pakistan, is a dollhouse-pretty building, ringed by palm trees and rice paddies. Once it stood at the junction of two great Pakistani rail lines: the Kandahar State Railway, which raced north through...
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BRTS: Lessons Delhi can learn from Ahmedabad's transport system - Vishal Dutta, Economic Times
Both Delhi and Ahmedabad, which are separated by nearly 800 kilometres of road, boast a Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS). But the Ahmedabad BRTS reminds one of the Delhi Metro rather than its Delhi counterpart. Buses in the Gujarat city run (mostly) on time and use an automated passenger information system.
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Amma’s multifaceted empire, built on hugs - Jake Halpern, NYT
There are entourages — and then there is the retinue of Mata Amritanandamayi, a 59-year-old Indian guru known simply as Amma, or “mother.” On Friday, she began a two-month North American tour during which she will be accompanied by 275 volunteers. They plan to ride in four buses across the continent from Bellevue, Wash., to Marlborough, Mass...
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The extraordinary dream of ordinary lives - Shamik Bag, Mint
As a commanding officer in the Indian Air Force, retired Group Captain Samarjit Dhar believes he’s always had an eye for achievers. And there she was—the young girl from whom Dhar had bought eggs at the Dum Dum Park bazaar in Kolkata for the past 12 years. Dhar knew she had lost her father when she was 10 years old, but she had completed her schooling...
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In the Himalayas, journeys of faith and flowers - Michael Benanav, NYT
Deep in the gorge that it carves through the Himalayas, the Alaknanda River rushed beneath a footbridge. On the right bank sat a busy Indian village, Govindghat, its one street lined with spartan hotels and shops brimming with Sikh religious items and souvenirs. On the left bank, a man wearing a frayed sweater-vest and a ski cap greeted me imploringly.
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Bronze bonanza - Pushpa Chari, Hindu
The Nataraja icon has been variously described as “the most perfect representation of rhythmic movement in art,” “a visual sermon expounding compassion and universal power” and as portraying the “very essence of the ongoing unending cycle of life, death and rebirth.” In his superbly crafted collection of Natarajas now on view at an exhibition, shilp guru L. Rathakrishnan captures...
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How two former i-bankers of Indian origin are re-engineering dosas to please American palate - Sanjay Vijayakumar, EconomicTimes
Two former investment bankers, who have together managed about $1.5 billion (nearly Rs 8,500 crore) in assets, are convinced that the dosa has what it takes to help Indian cuisine enter the big league in the West. For more than a year now, Jawahar Chirimar and Sam Subramaniam, who have more than 20 years of experience...
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Bangalore’s rain-catcher: A man who never had to pay corporation for water - Nilofer D'Souza, FirstPost
Heavy rains in the past three days have cooled Bangalore and also helped raise water levels in dams that supply water to the city. But there is one man in the city who is unhappy. “We should learn to keep the rains in our homes,” says AR Shivakumar, senior fellow and principal investigator- RWH, Karnataka State Council...
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Indonesia gifts U.S. a Saraswati statue - Hindu
Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, has gifted an imposing 16-foot-high statue of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of education and wisdom, to Washington DC. The goddess’ statue, on top of a lotus, stands tall a block away from the Indian Embassy in front of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi. Hindus constitute just three per cent...
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160 years on, the telegram retires to the museum - Chandan Mitra, Pioneer
This had to happen sooner or later. Barring Generation Ex, probably none will shed tears over its demise. The once-ubiquitous telegram lost its utility with the advent of mobile telephony and the internet. The world’s way of communicating changed dramatically and what was once a revolutionary and the fastest mode of communication became redundant...
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Revealed: Prince William's Indian ancestry - Mario Ledwith, Daily Mail
DNA testing has revealed that Prince William will become the first British monarch of Indian ancestry. A clear genetic line has been drawn between the Duke of Cambridge and a half-Indian woman, potentially marking him as the first King whose bloodline is descended from the country. Analysis of saliva samples on relatives of Prince William...
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They have the answers - Mayank Austen Soofi, Mint
Entry restricted—this office in south Delhi’s Zamrudpur village is for quizzers only. Books, eclectically dissimilar books, everywhere. Pakistan: A Hard Country next to World Cricketers: A Biographical Dictionary. And Puranic Encyclopaedia atop Larousse Gastronomique. The readers of these well-thumbed volumes are the people who should be your new best friends—they frame questions...
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A lake comes to life - Pankaja Srinivasan & Subha J Rao, Hindu
It feels like a carnival at Ukkadam, home to the Periyakulam Lake. It is the final Sunday of volunteering, as the monsoons are expected any time now. School children are shrill with excitement, college students jump out of buses laughing and shouting out greetings; picnic umbrellas dot the area. The CRPF, the police and people from the Armed Forces work together in precision, as if performing a drill.
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Washington calls Beijing's bluff - B Raman, Pioneer
The House Foreign Affairs Committee has asked the Obama Administration not to allow China to open any more Consulates till such time the US is allowed to open a Consulate in Lhasa. India should emulate this strategy as we have stronger reasons for a Consulate in Lhasa.
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Verbatim |
 What happened (in 2002) was a blot. But it’s not good if we remember just that and forget other things that are happening. I congratulate Narendra Bhai. Gujarat’s development is helpful for India and if Gujarat develops the nation will also develop. I hope Narendra Modi won’t be confined to Gujarat for long and the nation will get his services.
Nitish Kumar, in December 2003 |
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With Modi as leader, BJP will sweep UP in LS polls -
K Balakrishnan, LensOnNews
WITH NARENDRA MODI moving to the forefront of national politics and receiving accolades for every speech and every public appearance that he makes, it’s only a question of time before the BJP announces that it will fight the next Lok Sabha polls under his leadership as its PM candidate. |
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