When she was only eight, Nisha was put on the road by desperately poor parents to earn her keep selling cigarettes, gutkha and other odd nicotine fixes. Two years later, today, not much has changed for her. She religiously puts up her makeshift shop every morning at the same spot she claimed for herself then, on a Noida pavement - the one by the DND near sector 16. Her dishevelled
I attended a talk at Oxford by Geir Lundestad, Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo and Secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee since 1990 and he spoke on Power and Norms: What can the Nobel Peace Prize accomplish? Being an Indian student at Oxford I had one obvious question in my mind “why did Mahatma Gandhi never receive the Nobel Peace prize?” Somebody symbolic of
Around a decade ago, LK Advani gave a sagacious advice to the Ambani brothers. “Let politicians do their politics and run the country; you concentrate on your business,” Advani is believed to have told the Ambanis when they called on him at his office at North Block. The meeting followed what appeared to be brazen attempts by the two brothers to influence public policy and poli
I am hard placed to understand the hissy fit Indians are having over the US airport pat down of ambassador Meera Shankar or the one now on another diplomat Hardeep Singh for being asked to show his turban. What part of the American message have we not understood since 9/11? I love the way a billion people go up in arms over abs nothing. In any case, diplomats are just people who j
A significant section of mediapersons, largely those who describe themselves as belonging to the “old school of journalism”, have been experiencing a serious degree of heartburn and gut churn following the recent media exposés on Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi, and the NDTV discussion where a collegial panel of scribes put Dutt under the microscope. Such exposés, by their
Bureaucracy in India, a la PJ Thomas and Neera Yadav shenanigans, needs a complete overhaul. Prime minister Manmohan Singh has been advocating, for umpteen numbers of times, transformation of the civil service in the country. Come Civil Service Day (April 21), homily and sermons do surely make headlines, till one more bunch of terminology replaces the earlier ones. That the civil service in Ind
Today, the Indian media - both print and television - are focusing on the recent corruption scandals involving the UPA government with unusual zeal. However, I fail to understand why almost every commentator, every TV anchor, every editorial writer feels compelled to pay ritual obeisance to the “personal honesty and integrity” of Dr Manmohan Singh while dealing with the scandals ema
Corruption is again dominating the news in India. Long-standing issues, such as broad attempts to avoid taxes, have simmered back to the surface and been joined by new accusations against the wealthy, major companies, and the government. Scandals have crossed finance, property, and telecom. Crimes have been
[Nikam published this column on May 12, 2010 on his website. See the original here.] For the last nearly a month, the name of Niira Radia has been in circulation. Two publications, Outlook and The Pioneer, raised the issue first almost simultaneously. While Outlook concentrated on the is
Barkha Dutt was sold down the river by NDTV. If this was the slave era, Prannoy Roy would have got a good price for the wench. He still won. What he did get for his coldblooded murder of the Dutt icon was a one hour self indulgent exercise in marketing his channel as a citadel of virtue and Dutt be damned. Take her away, she’s damaged goods. For graceless TV mediated by a dreary Edit
The study of history can be, at times of media polemics as the one now ravaging the Indian media, fun,fascinating and immensely valuable. How PR, or more specifically political PR,a la Nira Radia Tapes, emerged as a powerful tool and a full-time preoccupation in America can be gauged from the fact that in the US today there are a couple of lakhs of practitioners who call themselves
I was struggling to make space between two seats in an overcrowded ladies compartment of the Delhi Metro for a little girl to sit when my phone beeped. It was my mother. The message said: Women are beating men in the ladies compartment of the Guragon-bound train. They are showing this on TV. Policewomen are making them do sit-ups. The text was followed by a smiley. My mother hardly tr
"Yahan se pachaash- pachaash kosh door gaon mein jab bacha raat ko rota hai to maa kehti hai bete so ja, so jaa nahin to Gabbar Singh aa jayega.” This immortal dialogue of Gabbar Singh, one of the most popular villains of Hindi cinema, remains firmly etched in our minds. As Nitish Kumar is applauded for his hard fought and well-earned victory
For the past four decades, Barauni assembly constituency of Begusarai district in Bihar was held as an impregnable communist bastion. Not so any more. The CPI’s citadel fell this morning in face of a saffron surge. The BJP won this seat by a huge margin. The fall of Barauni assembly signifies many things. The assembly segment known as industrialised segment of Bihar was the cr
For many, many of us, the nightmarish picture Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman present in their book “Manufacturing Consent” is a bit outlandish. They argue that many respected and liberal news media organisations actually work in cahoots with corporates to control public opinion. But, we think of our favourite newspaper (or news anchor) and their scoops and stings and it is
The spectrum scam is not just about A Raja. To believe that he could have single-handedly caused a loss of Rs1.76 lakh crores is to overstate his capacity and calculating abilities. Nor is this a system failure: On the contrary the system that includes various ministries, departments, official watchdogs like CAG and the judiciary has actually worked. The media again did its bit while whistleblo
The Gate is back, long live the Gate! One of the enduring rules of the media teetered on the verge of being abandoned this fortnight before the right thinking restored it to its primacy. Headline writers and TV anchors seemed to have shut the gate behind them when ‘Kargilgate’ erupted. “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world” about sums it up. Or if
Sleaze sells. Makers of reality shows such as Bigg Boss and Rakhi Ka Insaaf know this well. So do those who run the so-called news channels which keep decrying such shows only because that gives them an excuse to play the visuals from these shows, mount protracted discussions and draw viewers to their own channels. It is manifestly clear that nobody in the media has been interested in self-regu
The man may still not be the foreign office’s answer to E Sreedharan. He certainly deserves the MVC for bravery. His mission is to do “strange” things like listening and engaging with people across the world. Strange because most rational diplomats would think Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are either for their kids or radioactive no-brainers for trouble. Some maintain dis
On the face of it, the Manmohan Singh government seems to have acted against Ashok Chavan and Suresh Kalmadi for their alleged involvement in corrupt deals, by removing one from the chief ministership of Maharashtra and the other from party’s parliamentary party. Given the opposition party’s unrelenting campaign and the latest report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (
