Opinion
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| | Modi Govt bends to conquer or has change of heart | | | | After the shocking defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Delhi assembly elections earlier this month, the NDA government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to have embarked on a charm offensive to not only push its legislative agenda in the budget session of parliament which began on 23 February but also to correct the popular perception that it cares for the people.
The session is expected to be stormy and particularly not a smooth exercise in the light of the ruling BJP's treatment of the opposition in the last two sessions of parliament. The Prime Minister and his council of minister had disregarded the opposition after the BJP's massive victory in the Lok Sabha polls in May last year and winning of assembly elections in Haryana, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Jammu & Kashmir.
Inebr... |  | |
| | | Hating to Part Syndrome..! | | | | I'm sure you've seen this happening as much as I have: You and your wife have finished an evening in a friend's place, have had dinner, spent time on long conversations, covering many topics, and then it's time to go. You and spouse walk to the doorstep, you say goodbye to the man of the house, and then when you've taken a few steps out realize your wife and his haven't finished what you think are their goodbyes.
You wonder, and as you watch your friend, you realize he's also wondering, how a simple goodbye can stretch so long. You both come closer to the scene of the extended goodbyes, and to both your astonishments expressed as you gaze at each other, understand they are not saying goodbye. They are actually conversing on an entirely new topic, a topic that could have easily been handl... | | |
| | | Congress at Crossroads | | | | Shivam Vij of Scroll has got a cute solution to the existential crisis facing the Congress: Get Rahul Gandhi married: "What would have been Rahul Gandhi's fate if he had been an 'aam aadmi' instead of the Gandhi scion? At 44, his family would have forced him to get married, or get out of the house and stop being a no-good dependent. Marriage will at least turn around his public image. He will be seen as someone who is "settling down", that favorite phrase of South Asian parents."
Sensible, if gratuitous, piece of advice! Seriously though what could the grand old party do to arrest its fall? The crisis of credibility that it battles today is perhaps the gravest since its immaculate conception in 1888 by an English bureaucrat. And if it does not act and act soon to reinvent itself, it ris... | | |
| | | True Joy ..! | | | | She was short, squat and dowdy, and as I ran to join the group of tourists at the heritage building I wondered what this women was doing as a guide. The lady looked up over the heads of the others and instead of annoyance, smiled, and suddenly I saw more than just friendliness, I was being welcomed because the guide was glad there was one more to listen to her talk.
And what a talk it was.
"This," she said, "is an ancestral house, nearly three hundred years old!"
"Three hundred years old!" said a newly married husband in the group and winked at his pretty blushing bride.
"Yes sir! And you can rest assured the owners were as amorous and as great lovers as you and your wife are!" she exclaimed and pointed to a giant wooden four poster bed that lay in the middle of the room. "As you can ... | | |
| | | Kashmir: Fifty years since 1965 War | | | | The expectation of Operation Gibraltar was that the population would rise up against Indian
'occupation' to coincide with a festival and the anniversary of the first incarceration of Abdullah in 1953 on 8-9th August, while the military columns would interdict Indian military reaction.
Emboldened by the unrest in Kashmir in relation to the Moe-e-Muqaddas episode over the turn of the year 1963-64, Pakistan figured that the time was ripe for wresting Kashmir. Politically, it was worried by the moves afoot to normalize India's relations with Kashmir, evident in the change of nomenclature of Sadar e Riyasat and Wazir e Azam in April and third time internment of Sheikh Abdullah in May. It wanted to act militarily before India recovered from the drubbing of 1962. While the war officially dat... | | |
| | | Someone Tougher Than Me..! | | | | I decided to go through some of the books I'd got the year before and not gone through: Right down the pile was Robert Schuller's book, "Tough Times Never Last, But Tough People Do!"
I knew there was something in the book that had touched me, and I opened it wondering what it was; my eyes went to the inner cover where my elder one had scribbled a note, "To Daddy!" she had written, "The toughest person I'll ever know!"
I had tears as I saw those words.
"My little one," I whisper, "I'm not half as tough as you think I am," and I hear her saying, "Of course you are daddy, of course you are! You remember the time I was sick, really sick, mummy was crying, everybody was weeping but you sat by me on the bed, not a tear in your eye, I was scared dad, but you looked me in the face and said I'... | | |
| | | AAP Politics | | Paradigm change in Indian politics | | | With the mainstream national political parties losing to a greenhorn Aam Admi Party (AAP), a political coup d'état has been witnessed in the just-concluded Delhi Assembly elections. The AAP has actually overshot its own expectations by bagging as many as 67 seats in a 70-member Legislative Assembly. Many established, mainstream political parties were decimated in the process. It was a fictional David versus Goliath battle where the former always wins the day owing to the latter's arrogance. The truth, however, remains that a few months back few political pundits were willing to believe that the AAP would ever win even a respectable number of seats after Arvind Kejriwal resigned as Delhi's Chief Minister last year, not to speak of being in a position to form the government for the second t... | | |
| | | Feeding A Goat..! | | | | There was this young lady who lost her cell phone and was forced to stay off Facebook and away from texting friends for a few days. She said she actually found herself doing something she hadn't done in a couple of years; interacting with her family. She felt as if she got her life back and was worried that she'd slip into the same old patterns with her new phone.
And yet what happens when we leave our phone at home and go out, we panic!
Katherine Coroso Jackson, mother of the late pop star Michael Jackson, explained this about her son: "It all really started when Michael was three or four years old. The TV broke and the kids started dancing and singing to entertain themselves. I convinced their father they were good, and after he listened to them, he agreed with me." The TV broke and, ... | | |
| | | Analysing BJP's defeat in Delhi | | | | It is, indeed, instructive to analyse why the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) was decimated at the polls in Delhi. But the more important point to know is how the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has emerged with a bang: 67 seats in a house of 70! The BJP is down to just three seats from the 32 it had won in the December 2013 assembly election. What is the AAP all about? It is a secular, left-of-centre party, which may provide an alternative option in the country, replacing the Congress which is languishing. Some time ago, a set of motivated people from different fields joined the Gandhian, Anna Hazare, in his campaign for the appointment of Lokpal (ombudsman) in order to fight corruption at high places. The movement engulfed the whole of India in no time because the campaign had permeated all se... | | |
| | | Not Just Watching Cricket..! | | | | Am watching the World Cup matches and am saddened by an advertisement. I'm sure you've all seen it, and if you haven't you must be putting off your TV set whenever the over is over! It's a marvelous match I'm watching, Shikhar Dhawan hitting fours and sixes all over the ground, and then comes the ad, that of a son cleaning his father's spectacles: What a loving act! How sweet it looks. I realize no ones ever cleaned my glasses, and I begin to think, what a loving son, the young child is! The father is so happy.
Then comes the moment of truth: He's not doing it for love, he's doing it so his dad will give him something in return!
Is that what acts of love are today?
Are deeds done for selfish reasons?
Where has love gone?
Have we reached a stage where everything we do is to get someth... | | |
| | | For Western wonks, ISIS is Islam and Islam is ISIS | | | | President Barack Obama may have touched a billion hearts by insisting that terrorists do not speak for a billion Muslims. Hosting a first of its kind counterterrorism conference at the White House, Obama hit all the right buttons, emphasizing that violent extremism is not peculiar to any religion: "No religion is responsible for violence and terrorism. People are responsible. We have to make sure...that we do not stigmatize entire communities."
He also warned against casting the fight against extremism in terms of a civilizational conflict: "The notion that the West is at war with Islam is an ugly lie. And all of us, regardless of our faith, have a responsibility to reject it."
Obama's comments come at a time when Islamophobia in the West on the one hand and global concerns over the gro... | | |
| | | Free at last......! | | | | "She is dying Bob," said the voice over the phone
"Get her into hospital," I said.
"She doesn't want to go!"
"She has to go," I said.
"She says she is ready to die!"
The conversation lingered in my mind through the whole evening. I knew what my friend had said was true. His wife was ready for death. She had told me so. I remembered something I had read, written by the Director or radiotherapy and radiology in New Zealand, in 1973:
'Cancer makes people start thinking about the quality of their lives. Everything they do has a cleaner edge on it and they get more out of life. In fact some people never become completely human beings and really start living until they get cancer. We all know we are going to die sometime, but cancer makes people face up to it….. They are going to on livin... | | |
| | | Beyond Congress's Leadership Failure | | An existential crisis | | | It's a telling comment on the state of the Indian National Congress that a four-member committee it appointed four months ago to devise a strategy to rejuvenate the party and fight the Modi government has turned out a non-starter.
The failure is particularly grave coming as it does immediately after the Congress's rout in Delhi, which it had ruled for 15 years, but where its vote fell from 25 percent in December 2013 to 15 percent in May last to 9.7 percent last fortnight. Since then, the party has again been battered in one Lok Sabha and six Assembly byelections in various states including West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, and in local body elections in Assam.
The "research and coordination committee's" four members-Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore professor MV Rajeeva Gowda, former ... | | |
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