Do check the facts of your tweet if you do not want 50-odd Narendra Modi supporters lashing out at you for your brilliant faux pas. Ask Kerala MP Shashi Tharoor. On Thursday, Tharoor tweeted about an article, from a listings site ‘Sulekha.com’ which cites statistics showing how Kera
Shortly after the news of Bitihotra Mohanty’s arrest in Kerala last week, came news that Ram Singh had ‘committed suicide’ in Delhi’s Tihar Jail. Bitti has been on the run since 2006, when he jumped parole and escaped a seven-year sentence for raping a 26-year-old German woman in Alwar, Rajasthan. Singh was the main accused in the brutal Delhi gangrape of 23-year-old par
I felt depressed after reading Chanakya’s New Manifesto To Resolve the Crisis Within India. This isn’t because the book, drawn from Pavan K Varma’s readings of Chanakya’s Arthashastra, tells the truth as it is. It’s because the new manifesto that Varma draws for addressing these cancers will never be achieved. Let me explain. At the very outset, th
One thing which the BJP and Congress have in common is their double standard when it comes to issues related to the western world. Praise from foreign leaders, newspapers and magazines is presented as an endorsement, while criticism is dismissed, by simply saying that external opinions don`t count. The grand old party spared no opportunity to shield Dr Manmohan Singh from domestic criti
The social media is smelling a rat in the alleged suicide of December 16, gangrape accused Ram Singh who, according to reports, hanged himself in his cell with a rope made of his ‘own clothes’. No one believes the story of the suicide; and the laxity of the police administration, which is unable to guard its own prisoners in custody, now comes to fore. Also re
Akhilesh Yadav, the chief minister of UP, was recently reported as stating that the bureaucrat has “no allegiance to anyone” (kisi ka nahin hota hai). This statement was made while addressing the party workers. It is not clear whether the statement was adulatory, referring to the neutrality and impartiality of the civil servant; or was it a lament that the senior bureaucrat has no &
There is much anger among lawyers on the release of the upcoming release of Arshad Warsi-starrer starrer, Jolly LLB. As soon as its trailer went on air, at least three different cases were filed against the release of the movie scheduled for March 15. A group of lawyers in Meerut moved the Delhi high court against the release of the movie claiming that the scenes in the trailer
I woke up to screaming adverts and news stories in the papers this morning about the many facets, and the many faces, of Indian women; how important they are to our lives, and the national economy; how it is our duty to respect them. It felt good, though a little heady: a little patronising, are we being? Reaching office, I logged on to facebook, where a woman friend — a f
The UPA government has completed nine years in office. Nine years is a reasonable period for any government to leave its footprints behind. It can effect changes which will impact the destiny of the nation. The UPA has a dismal record in office. It inherited the governance of an enthusiastic nation. India was being show-cased before the world as an investment destination. The NDA left behind a
One day, many thousand years ago, somewhere near what is now the national capital lived a man named Devabrata. When his father, a king named Shantanu (ahem), a man apparently not known for his fidelity, like many kings of that era and later, fell in love with a fisherwoman’s daughter and wanted to marry her, young Devabrata took a vow that wows India till date: never to marry, to look aft
When economic indicators are not very promising, one thing which can bring cheers to everybody’s life is an entrepreneurial activity in social, cultural, educational and technological fields. These mavericks will bring about new hope and generate new space for creativity to manifest, connection to be forged and empathy to pervade across sectors, spaces and social segments. If this
It’s 2014, just after the general elections and the national debate on who will be the PM is heating up. A look at how the main characters are lined up, and how they act, react and enact the PM-in-the-wings role before the curtains go up on the 16th Lok Sabha. Sonia Gandhi: As chairperson of UPA-37 (it came apart and came together 35 times in the last few months),
In 1999, on a monotonous bus journey from Lucknow to Allahabad to unwillingly (and by my own reason also unnecessarily) represent my father at the wedding of a long forgotten and wholly dispensable cousin, I was woken by the sudden jolt caused by the brakes. Tried more by reluctance than tedium, I angrily asked the bus conductor what we were supposed to do at the roadside dhabha near Pratapgarh
Home minister Sushilkumar Shinde, it seems, is carrying the stick he ought to have left behind in the police station when he quit as a constable. On Friday, he threatened to use it — metaphorically, of course — on the ministry mandarin/s who messed up the message of his statement on the rape and murder of three minor dalit girls in Bhandara, Maharashtra. While making a state
The aam aadmi has his own views on P Chidambaram’s budget but he leaves you in no doubt about one aspect of it. When you ask him about the surcharge on the income tax on the super-rich, he grins and there are others as well who join him on this, all grinning and nodding in agreement. There is an added incentive too – the increase in duties on the vehicles that the rich prefer to dri
Finance minister P Chidambaram may have built a Robin Hood-like image for himself by imposing a ‘super-rich’ tax on high net worth individuals (HNIs) and corporate bodies while dramatically increasing funds for social sector welfare schemes, he continues to write off huge amounts of tax liabilities of these very super-rich too. The statement of revenue foregone, relea
The recent developments in the ongoing trial of the accused in the infamous Nirbhaya rape and murder case have thrown up new challenges on the possible misuse of the juvinile justice law. The contradictions and subjectivity of the government authorities has added to this possible misuse of the legal provisions relating to determination of age of persons accused in a crime. Amid t
The economic survey, presented in parliament on Wednesday, has a curious new feature: a full chapter on ‘Seizing the demographic dividend’, on how the youth are going to dominate the next decade or so, and what it means for the future of job creation in India. Of course, ‘demographic dividend’ is not a new phenomenon for economists. It has also attracted
On Tuesday, as he started with a flourish, quoting couplets, hemmed and hawed midway through his rail budget speech as the din rose in the opposition benches and wound up with a whimper, almost sheepishly, as fellow cabinet colleague Kamal Nath advised him to wrap up, railway minister Pawan Kumar Bansal looked a bit like one those Indian Railway trains. You just cannot set predict them.
The Hyderabad blasts have revived the debate over national counter terrorism centre (NCTC), former union home minister P Chidambaram’s pet project to create an overarching organization to fight terrorism in the country, which was put on hold last year following widespread protests from the state governments. Chidambaram’s successor Sushil Kumar Shinde urged the state governments the
