Civil War
Union Home Minister Prakash Chand Sethi has elevated the art of governance to a fine degree of pettifoggery. Political interference in the bureaucracy is not…
READING THE BAR CODES
“UPON MY WORD: India’s prisons are stuck in a time warp” STRANGE HOW time’s machine travels back and forth at warp speed. Two hundred and…
Betting on Farms
India is a land of plenty. It is also a land of plenty of waste. If you suffer Malthusian nightmares of the Great Unfed Billions,…
Bihar Press Bill-Battle Cry
Whatever else the government is butter-fingered at doing, it is adept at keeping the results of its impetuosity in a state of continuing suspense’. The…
Faith, Hope And No Charity
The International Year of Disabled Persons (IYDP) began with a bang: the National Federation of the Blind led its members in a vociferous agitation in…
Not Selling Volumes
It was a browser’s dream come true kilometres of books that took hold of the bibliophile’s heart-strings and did not stop tugging for hours. For…
Friend in Need
The Rashtriya Swyamsewak Sangh (RSS) is everybody’s favourite bugbear. So perhaps it was inevitable that it would be accused of having a hand in the…
From Flood To Trickle
Large advertisements in Delhi newspapers-last fortnight announced that Mother Dairy was being forced to dilute the fat content of milk supplied to the capital’s citizens…
Spate Of Senseless Tragedies
Qutab Minar, the 72.5-metre-high monolithic tower that Iltutmish built 750 years ago, witnessed two shocks in its hoary life-span. In 1368, it was struck by…
Bihar – For Whom The Bill Tolls
One of the misconceptions spawned by the Bihar Press Bill is that it will emasculate Bihar’s journalists. The truth is that Bihar’s journalists have already…
Toilet – Training India
On September 25, the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi received the Gates Foundation’s Global Goalkeepers Award in New York for his leadership of the Swachh…
Finger on the pules?
Modi has promised to double farmers’ incomes by 2022, but angry farmers have lost faith Two-thirds of Indians depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. As…
Killing me Softly
Death is inevitable, but not in a gas chamber He took a deep breath of air. Once again he caught a strangeness on the wind,…
APOCALYPSE NOW
Forget global warming and focus on local warnings Kanpur, Faridabad, Varanasi, Gaya, Patna, Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, Muzaffarpur. Nine of the world’s ten most polluted cities…
Suffer The Children
Mere laws do not guarantee our youngest citizens a safe and healthy life The other day, I watched this video of four-year-old Jackson Drew reciting…
THE AIR IS THICK
The Good news is that both the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress seem to have finally woken up to the looming catastrophe of air pollution…