The most disturbing thing about this end of the world stuff on December 21, 2012 is that I have a cheque given to me for December 22 and that is really unjust. What if I cannot cash it? So, let’s not get too carried away with the abrupt end of the Mayan calendar I want to cash that cheque. Maybe they ran out of ink or papyrus or simply got bored with the whole thing, like an unfin
Ever since the country heard of the horrendous Sunday night incident in which a 23-year-old paramedical student was gangraped in a moving bus in south Delhi, people have been expressing their angst in different ways. Political leaders, women’s rights activists, lawyers and the common man have reacted sharply to the incident, and the entire capital is once again discussing the pressing iss
Who exactly is standing for the cause of the victim of the beastly gang rape that took place inside a moving bus in south Delhi late Sunday evening? Is it only the young victim in hospital, battling for a life scarred, and/or impaired? Except for the frenzy on social media and slogan-shouting by the political class, there is no sustained effort at finding concrete steps to ensure such c
Reservation (noun): 1. [mass noun] the action of reserving something: the reservation of positions for non-Americans 2. [count noun] an arrangement whereby something, especially a seat or room, is reserved for a particular person: do you have a reservation? That’s Oxford dictionary for you. In Indian context, the first means “quota” a broad classification to res
These are troubled times for the once celebrated steel frame of the country. Governance has virtually collapsed and a large part of the blame is being laid at the doors of the civil services. Corruption charges are flying thick and fast and there is a general perception that the neta-babu-businessman combine has been able to manipulate the system to serve its vested interests. A number of senio
A recent report (read http://www.governancenow.com/news/regular-story/millennium-development-goals-case-shifting-goalpost) on United Nations Millennium Development Goals (UNMDGs) is interesting, in that it evaluated the progress on the much-discussed millennium goals as a case of sh
One of the joys of buying something new is the access it gives to customer service. Experience might have taught you that like the unicorn and the phoenix, customer service is a mythical beast, yet with that optimism which causes the human race to get married and have babies, we continue to hope that the next one will be real and will solve all problems – electrical, mechanical, analogica
Paradoxically, many of the social forces which derive strength from the grassroots are becoming intolerant of dissent and diversity of opinion at grassroots in different parts of the country. On one hand, social media is criticised and not for completely wrong reasons for keeping millions of people busy with trivia. On the other hand, it is also providing space for people to express their opini
There might be different ways to read into how and why the North Korean leadership is behaving the way it has over the past few years, and especially this year of 2012. While a consensus on how best to deal with it is yet to be reached, there seems to be a broad consensus that with this long-range rocket launch the country has demonstrated its defiance to the international community in no uncer
I am a lawyer and wanted to experiment with journalism, so here I am, writing for Governance Now (GN), a magazine which deals with governance issues. During my stint here, I had an opportunity to compare the modalities of both professions – ‘aide to the third’ and ‘the fourth’ pillar of democracy. The similarities The
Still smarting under the shock of the November 17 shootout at Ponty Chadha’s Chhattarpur farm that left the liquor baron and his brother dead, the Gurgaon gentry was rattled once more by a gruesome shootout on December 11 inside the intensive care unit of a city hospital, barely a few kilometers from Chadha’s farmhouse. Triggered by a property dispute, the shootout resulted
Contemporary Indian society is increasingly assuming a surreal quality. Every institution, individual in authority, public figure or celebrity (with honourable exceptions of course!) seems to be strangely devoid of any respect evoking quality as they all seem to send out a strange mixed signal – ‘I am important/visible and/or rich but do not deserve to be’. Traditional value s
Reaching the pinnacle is always easier than maintaining your grip on it. Kerala is learning it the hard way. Popular imagination tends to be static; often hanging on to a perception that might have long lost touch with reality. With some justification, Kerala can proudly claim to have scaled new heights in the empowerment of women, land reforms and in achieving a quality of health that’s
Last year Superman renounced his US citizenship, and many asked if that was in response to a possible attack from right-wingers regarding his birth certificate. As we have known for decades now, Superman was not born in the US, not even in Mexico or round the corner in India, but on a different planet altogether. There is some confusion over the citizenship deal between Krypton and the US, but
“He (Michael Porter) has influenced more executives – and more nations – than any other business professor on earth. Now, at 65, he and an all-star team aim to rescue the US economy,” Geoff Colvin of Fortune, wrote in the October 15, 2012 issue. Here’s what Porter and his valued co-author, Mark Kramer, are scripting via “creating shared value”!
Long before I had read Nobel laureate Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, I had wondered why one fine day everyone in my town started beating steel saucers with spoons. As a 15-year-old living in a sleepy, docile town not far from the birthplace of Lord Ram, I wondered why people got on their rooftops every evening and beat kitchenware. The deafening frenzy buried all hopes of a deb
Locking up this Indian couple, the Chandrashekhars in Norway for over a year each because they supposedly whupped their kid is laughable to most of us. There has to be some sense in all this. You can give the parents community service or something but not jail sentences that destroy the family forever. This is not justice. None of us condone child abuse and, in fact, the punishment for
A couple of months before the assembly elections in Gujarat, the main opposition Congress started a gimmick of sorts. It promised an affordable housing scheme, in the unlikely case of the party coming to power. It didn’t end there: it started distributing application forms for this promised scheme, called Ghar-nu Ghar, a Gujarati idiom meaning one’s own house. It was former CM Shank
A lot has been said, discussed, debated over and argued on regarding free speech over the last few days. Last month’s arrest of two young women in Palghar, Maharashtra, over a Facebook post following Bal Thackeray’s death was the incident that really broke the camel’s back. What civil society has been fussing over for a long time culminated in an incident where everyone got a
It was a week when I had a feast of ideas in a wide range of domains across the country. It was apparent that despite all the cynicism that headlines in newspapers may generate in the mind of common people, the effort to create new performance benchmarks continues. The indefatigable spirit of those who believe in the future of the country deserves to be appreciated. When Rajeev Chawla,
