When I’m sixty-four Give me your answer, fill in a form Mine for evermore Will you still need me Will you still feed me When I’m sixty-four? Average life expectancy at birth for Indians in 2010 was 64.4 years, which means the Beatles song could be an elegy. We fared more poorly than our neighbors,…
The only blood that sub-inspector Kabir Singh Limbo has seen spilled in the Nellie area has been in very bad road accidents on National Highway 37 as traffic whizzes past. Limbo has been in charge of the tin-roofed Nellie police outpost for a year-and-a-half. During monsoons, Limbo says, parts of the highway linking Assam’s Goalpara…
Early this month I travelled to Agra to walk barefoot around the Taj Mahal, the only wonder of the world that stands in honour of a woman. Make no mistake. That mausoleum was built three and a half centuries ago in memory of a very powerful woman. She was a confidante and counsellor to Shah…
From the Editor Then we had to find the rule and the string again, and a new hole was made; and, about midnight, the picture would be up — very crooked and insecure, the wall for yards round looking as if it had been smoothed down with a rake, and everybody hot and wet and…
From the Editor On June 1, as the mercury hit 47 Celsius and turned Delhi’s roads — or what passes for them in most parts — into pancake griddles, the government released a report that feebly tried to suggest remedies for the human-resource mess in Air India. The same day there was bad news about…
From the Editor Turkmenistan’s “President for Life” Saparmurat Niyazov erected a 50-ft gold-plated statue of himself in the centre of the capital Ashgabat, eight years before he gave immortality the slip in 2006. The statue rotated through the day, always pointing to the sun. We have noted the gold-plating stage yet, but we certainly know…
From the Editor There are times when we at Business Today chafe at being a fortnightly. There is so much happening in business and the economy that we storytellers are fit to burst. It is not just what you see in the printed magazine—our website www.businesstoday.in is up to nearly a million page views. Our…
From the Editor Business Today’s team of reporters was putting finishing touches to the BT–YES Bank Best CFO Survey starting on page 57. The 14 men and one woman who have won this year’s awards, chosen by a stellar jury after a rigorous nationwide search, bring to life the satisfaction of making those numbers on…
These are extraordinary times and we witness extraordinary phenomena. Three weeks before the Union Budget, when finance ministers customarily crawl under their carapaces, the honourable Member of Parliament from Sivaganga delivered a rousing speech on national security. What he said, with feeling and not a little frustration, was that Indians seem to disdain economic growth.…
Many of us are making our fortunes elsewhere John Denver’s 1969 Rendition of this song is famous, but my heartstrings are tugged more by the Peter, Paul and Mary version of 1967. That was just two years after the Hart-Celler Act amended America’s immigration laws and flipped around the overwhelmingly white, European tide to let…
Star India’s Uday Shankar, already top dog in general entertainment, wants to prove his mettle again in sports TV There is a new spring in Uday Shankar’s step. The entertainment channels of Star India, the Indian unit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire and the company that Shankar leads as chief executive, are back firmly…
The RBI governor refuses to be drawn into the game of popularity stakes Well, I think we’ve still to get to a place where we feel satisfied. We have this saying, ‘in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. We’re a little bit that way. We feel things are turning to the…
By Goutam Das and Chaitanya Kalbag On a sunny October afternoon at an Andalusian-style resort in Southern California with breathtaking views of the Pacific, a senior PepsiCo information technology (IT) executive stopped in mid-sentence to peer thoughtfully into a glass of Chardonnay. The conversation, around outsourcing to India, had paused at Infosys, the poster child…
Yogi Deveshwar’s crack team converted every penalty corner into a goal. Yogesh Chander Deveshwar thinks that ITC Ltd. could be a model for running India’s state-owned companies. That is because banks and public financial institutions hold about 35 percent of ITC and have been a strong counterfoil to British American Tobacco Plc, which owns 31…
Budget 2012 is the final opportunity for the UPA to set the economy on as next years’ exercise will be influenced by the 2014 Lok Sabha elections Five experts on the economy joined Business Today editor Chaitanya Kalbag to discuss Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukerjee’s options as he finalises the forthcoming Union Budget. Yashwant Sinha,…
Ajit Gulabchand was delighted that his second grandson was born on his own 64th birthday. He had just come away from a meeting with a minister and other CEOs who were in the business of building highways. He has spent close to three decades at the helm of the HCC Group, which builds roads, bridges,…
Debu Bhattacharya, Managing Director, Hindalco, discusses the CBI case against his company. By Chaitanya Kalbag Hindalco Industries Ltd.’s Managing Director, Debu Bhattacharya, says that had he known how complex and fraught the process would be to set up an alumina plant and a smelter in Orissa, he would have never put it up. “I really don’t understand where we…
Innovation in India is not just about patents filed but about affordable, scalable solutions. At the NASSCOM India Leadership Forum held in Mumbai last fortnight, Business Today gathered an eclectic collection of thinkers to brainstorm about one topic: How important is innovation in the emerging world order? The hour-long discussion saw Gururaj Deshpande, serial entrepreneur;…
“You don’t have to be a ‘sting journalist’ to spy on somebody. Camera photographs and video are now ubiquitous, We never know who is recording what we are saying. Every email we send is ‘discoverable’ and we should be prepared to see anything we wrote splashed across a blog or a chatroom.” The audacious hacking…
Where responsibility for troubled histories can be clearly defined, other countries have tried to make amends. Germany has apologised for the horrors of the Holocaust… How far can you reach back in time if you want to right wrongs, real or perceived? Look back through history and nearly every nation can point to traumatic events…
Three warnings from history on the perils of popularity In November 1937, an extraordinary essay titled, ‘The Rashtrapati’, appeared in a respected Calcutta journal. Written under the pseudonym Chanakya, it soon became known that the author was, in fact, Jawaharlal Nehru, who had just led the Congress to victory in elections in a majority of…
You have to be tall to apologise, and taller still to atone The 2019 election campaign was set to be the biggest, costliest, and dirtiest in our democratic history. In this dog-eat-dog atmosphere, no politician can afford to indulge in humility or ask voters to forgive their past sins. Remorse and contrition make you look…
This Parliament should improve its last track record The dust has settled, and a new government will take oath this evening. We have just elected the 17th Lok Sabha. Can we expect a more dynamic Parliament as we head towards New India? There are some encouraging signs: the average age of the 542 newly elected…
The Dalai Lama is the face of a complex refugee problem The Dalai Lama, who completed 60 years of exile in India in March, is usually humorous and candid. Last weekend, however, shortly after World Refugee Day, the Tibetan spiritual leader drew attention for his maladroitness in an interview with the BBC. “European countries should…
The 48-year-old challenger is flat on his back on the canvas. The crowd is cheering on the champion, who is 20 years older but lighter on his feet. Is the challenger out for the count, or will he go another round? Can Rahul Gandhi breathe life back into his shattered organization? Three weeks after the…
A $5 trillion economy is a stretch. Do we have the running legs? In 2018, India’s per-capita GDP was $2,015.60, according to the World Bank. This makes sense — our economy is currently sized at $2.7 trillion, and our population is around 1.35 billion. This is considerably behind the US ($62,641), and not even a…
Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end! ‘I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?’ she said aloud. ‘I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth…’ —Alice’s Adventures in Wales (1865), Lewis Carroll Today marks the first day of the world’s biggest social media Election.…
India is walking into a middle-income trap with its eyes wide open The good news is that every. body — the IMF was the latest to fall in line on Tuesday — agrees with the RBI that India’s GDP growth rate will be a modest 7% in 2019-20. The 0.3 percentage point reduction in its…
How to create a state of suspended animation On August 5, the Indian government declared that Jammu and Kashmir is no longer an exception. On August 5, the Indian government decided to make Kashmir an exception. Why am I saying contradictory things about the same event? Because they are both facts. Bear with me. Removing…
Does this festive season herald fireworks or damp squibs? It is amazing how things come around. I was listening to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Houston speech. After speaking in several Indian languages, Modi said, “Maine itna hi kaha hai: Everything is fine.” Suddenly, I remembered the theme song from 3 Idiots. Eight years have gone…
One week before Phase 1, the votes still hold the cards Loyalty to the nation all the time, loyalty to the government when it deserves it. -Mark Twain After five years of ‘achhe din’, you would think we’d be gazing with happy expectation at the bright lights of even better days, looking forward to a…
How do Naga peace and Article 371A of the Constitution belong together? The abrogation of Article 370 and the five-week-old lockdown in Srinagar have triggered tremors 3,000 km away in Nagaland. Home minister Amit Shah repeated over the weekend at a meeting of the North Eastern Council that Article 371, which bestows special status on…
Nobody speaks in the language of the masses Remarkably, after seven decades of spirited democracy, India has produced only three leaders, who have enjoyed nationwide popularity — Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi. I am not considering Lal Bahadur Shastri or Rajiv Gandhi (whose only electoral win was on the rebound from his mother’s…
The name ‘Ram’ rolls easily off the tongue, whichever corner of India you come from, whichever Indian language your mother taught you. Although Rama and Krishna are the best-known gods in human form in our mythology, Rama is recognised across swathes of Southeast Asia. I have watched Ramayana ballets on Bali island, wayang shadow puppet…
Will the amended Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act happen just before the polls? We must not make a scarecrow of the law, setting it up to fear the birds of prey, And let it keep one shape till custom make it Their perch and not their terror. -Measure for Measure, William Shakespeare In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare…
Modi has been handed a blank cheque. He must ensure it doesn’t bounce Narendra Modi’s pulverising victory has wiped out every semblance of opposition in Parliament’s lower house. The Congress’ humiliation is so total that it will fail to be recognised as the main Opposition party in the Lok Sabha for the second time in…
India has crossed just one battle line, but many more lie ahead Political power grows out of the barrel of gun. More precisely, it grows from the air-to-air missiles mounted on an upgraded, but aging, MiG-21 Bison interceptor flown by the intrepid Wing Commander Abhimandan Vardhaman, who took on US-made Pakistani F16s on February 27.…
Stop taking CRPF for granted & get real about how we police our nation Chalte Raho Pyare Fauj. That is what the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) is fondly called in police parlance. Cynics would call them cannon fodder. The CRPF is the dogsbody of India’s internal security. They are sent to the aid of…
The government is performing a risky high-wire balancing act Let me put it simply: the government is performing two balancing acts simultaneously. In order to get to this perilous position, it has time and again turned precedent on its head, laying it open for the next administration to also throw caution to the winds. This…
The truth is, India isn’t rich enough to be a welfare state William Safire must be turning in his grave. The language maven and Richard Nixon speechwriter came up with the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism” phrase that US Vice- President Spiro Agnew used in a 1970 speech. Finance minister Arun Jaitley first used ‘nawabs of…
If you are of a certain age, and not one of the millennial Indians who will turn 18 this year and be eligible to vote, you might remember watching The Net, the 1995 thriller starring Sandra Bullock as a cybersecurity expert who gets into a whole lot of trouble with cyberterrorists, who erase her identity…
Be Careful what you digest from the result of the assembly elections I like only one kind of fudge and one kind of shake, the chocolate kind. And I especially dislike fudges and shakes of the economic kind. The Narendra Modi government, by no means on its last legs, has treated us to quite a…
Will India ever learn to speak loudly— and carry a small stick? Earlier this month, the United Nations issued its first set of ‘diya’ postage stamps to mark Diwali and the triumph of good over evil. It was a nice gesture – and I possess a sheet of the stamps – but a reminder of…
In all chatter on defence spend & Rafales, it’s the IAF that’s losing out Nobody with even a rudimentary interest in national security will dispute that the Indian Air Force (IAF) needs more firepower. Currently, it has 600 combat aircraft and 33 active squadrons against a sanctioned strength of 44. We face two implacable foes…
The smartest thing Prime Minister Narendra Modi did was to hitch the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) to the aura of Mahatma Gandhi. From its official launch at Raj Ghat on Gandhi Jayanti 2014, the Clean India message has been omnipresent and relentless. Like Gandhi’s mantra of swarajya, Modi has turned Swachh Bharat into a mass…
Will Ayushman Bharat do better that its predecessor schemes? Sometime over the next few weeks — most likely in his Independence Day speech — Prime Minister Narendra Modi will formally launch what has already been billed as the world’s biggest public healthcare programme, Ayushman Bharat, or the National Health Protection Mission (AB-NHPM). The scheme…
Will the NPA black hole suck in the country’s entire banking universe? With barely nine months to go before the Lok Sabha election, how serious is the crisis in our banking system? Put simply, it is not going to be resolved any time soon, although Gol is scrambling to force more medicine into the patient…
Politics was reduced to raucous pandering: if Modi’s speech was short of a clearer vision of New India, Rahul did not lay out a blueprint for a transfer of power either It says a lot about Narendra Modi’s absence of apprehension over Friday’s no-confidence motion in the Lok Sabha that the same day the foreign…
This government’s been raising expectations, not the economy The government’s ‘Saaf Niyat, Sahi Vikas’ (Clean Intent, Right Development) campaign is expectation management in an election year. Nineteen months after demonetisation, we still do not have a final count for the total volume of banned currency notes returned to the nation’s banks. Are we really a…
The PM has adopted legacy programmes and run them better They say the best way to persuade somebody is to plant an idea in their head and get them to start speaking about it as if it were their idea. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown he is a great persuader. Persuasion is one thing.…
Four years ago, I wrote in my first Needle’s Eye column that predictions about caste not dominating the 2014 elections were all hogwash. If you still believe that four years of this government have whipped up a centripetal force of development and transformation, you need to notify the I&B Ministry that you are being misled…
In business, especially in human-resource management, appraisers are cautioned to evaluate an individual’s or department’s performance over a sustained period and not let ‘recency’, the most recent events (especially the turbulent ones) colour their judgment. I was reminded of this axiom by the Narendra Modi government’s current stint in Trishanku’s heaven. For those of us…
In the summer of 1982, I travelled to Sidhi district in Madhya Pradesh to report on a fascinating archaeological expedition for India Today. An Indo-US team excavating in the Son Valley was sifting through stone artefacts from the Upper Paleolithic period (between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago) when they came across a rough circular sandstone…
What goes around, comes around. Two interesting things happened earlier this month, both concerning the Supreme Court. Starting February 6, Chief Justice Dipak Misra appeared to offer a truce in the stand off with his four most senior colleagues when, as “Master of the Roster’, he set up a new system of allocating cases by…
The prime minister’s speech at the World Economic Forum was sweeping and aspirational (one observer said he was “preaching to the choir”). He presented India as the most attractive investment destination in the world, with its democracy, its young population, its diversity and the headroom it has in catching up with the West’s levels of…
Here is my poll prediction: if, and only if, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wins power in Uttar Pradesh, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will roll out his biggest-bang reforms. He will recover his political capital, dented by the things that did not go well with demonetisation, and gather the courage to attempt to amend election…
As we chatted over our morning cups of tea, glancing at the dailies and their dose of grim news, and trying to balance the latest perfidies visited upon us by pondering over the good things happening in our lives as well, my wife uttered one of her bon mots: “Isn’t it interesting how we Indians…
“Those who make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”-Voltaire Absurdity was piled atop absurdity as seven weeks of vitriol ended in a splash on Tuesday with Prime Minister Narendra Modi taking a seaplane ride. When this prime minister, arguably the most powerful mass leader we have had in a generation, breaks security rules,…
While waiting for the 10,400 policemen who were deployed this week to guard Ivanka Trump in Hyderabad to go back to their regular duties of guarding lesser VIPs, I pondered over the eternal “Where are we in history?” question. Ms. Trump’s speechwriters were savvy enough to avoid comment on the hordes of beggars who had…
On Tuesday came news that India’s exports contracted for the first time in 13 months in October: Our trade deficit has widened to a near three-year high of $86 billion. Ready-made garment exports in October shrank 39% from a year earlier to $829.44 million. Apparel exports in April-October 2017 totalled $10 billion, rising just two…
It is easy to be overwhelmed by the mess in our education system. It is good to keep in mind, though, that there are many passionate people, both within and outside the government-school system, trying to put things right. The government seems incapable of doing so by itself. Inspiring good-news stories are dotted around our…
In the spirit of Diwali and new beginnings, I started this column determined to find good news stories in our school education system, because that is the foundation of a New India. I set out to explore, hoping that we are steadily building on a strong foundation for hundreds of millions of our children to…
In his book ‘How the BJP Wins’, Prashant Jha describes how Narendra Modi has led the Bharatiya Janata Party to near-invincibility by transmogrifying himself again and again over the past decade and a half. “If he was a Hindu Hriday Samrat (Emperor of Hindu Hearts) from 2002, Modi carefully transitioned into a vikas purush, the…
Those of us in our sixties, including our prime minister, will remember the goli soda. You used a little wooden gizmo to push in a marble stuck in the mouth of a bottle and guzzled the sweet, fizzy drink with the marble dancing around inside. Then you felt full and happy. But it was mostly…
Cabinet reshuffles seem to generate more excitement than the announcement of cricket teams. So we know what the best game in town is. We knew weeks earlier that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was going to re-order his squad after the end of parliament’s monsoon session. By Saturday, everybody and her sister knew exactly who was…
“Tis the season for chest-thumping. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is unquestionably on top of the heap. But what a heap it is. Over the past couple of weeks, quite a bit of nasty triumphalism has been on display. Such eruptions need a trigger, and a handy one was provided by the departing remarks of…
“August is the month of revolution,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in his monthly radio talk a few days ago. Wednesday was the 75th anniversary of the launch of the Quit India movement against British colonial rule, and Modi talked about the five-year journey from sankalp (intention) to siddhi (achievement) to independence in August 1947. …
In early June, a few weeks before the launch of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), Prime Minister Narendra Modi held an informal meeting with a group of senior bureaucrats at which, according to a government press release, he exhorted them to rise above the “administrative mechanisms of earlier centuries”. He urged them to seize…
Right now, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has the option to strengthen governance, really start to fix the country’s major economic problems, and reinforce our institutions The more you study India’s history the more you have to marvel at our infinite capacity to fight among ourselves. Ashoka, the last of the great Mauryan emperors, fought the…
In China, our difficult and, to many of us, menacing neighbour, they say “If you speak a lot you are more likely to say something wrong; if you speak less you are less likely to say something wrong; and if you do not speak at all, you will not say anything wrong. In Confucian thought,…
This ‘epoch-making’ transformation in indirect taxes has been anything but rapid. Modi & Jaitley are standing on shoulders of several PM-FM pairs of reformers Midnight has an eerie and slightly occult hold on our imaginations. It is the hour when magic is supposed to take place, when the old falls away and a new day…
How many different kinds of evidence do we need to convince ourselves that the economy is slowing dramatically? Consumer price index (CPI) inflation fell to 2.2% in May, but that was put down by facile analysis to plunging food prices and a good monsoon. The Index of Industrial Production (IIP) base year has been moved…
It was twenty years ago today Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play They’ve be been going in and out of style but they guaranteed to raise a smile …
Can you imagine Pope Francis being named the president of Brazil, which has the world’s largest Roman Catholic population (and the same number of people as Uttar Pradesh)? That is not going to happen, because the ‘Western’ way of thinking says there ought to be a separation of the temporal and the spiritual, the church…
As our all-too-brief winter slips into a warm spring, we are headed-once again-for another Judgement Day in our interminable elections. But, just as we start to weary of the burdens of democracy, it is useful to remember the meaning of that word: “power of the people”. Time and again we are reminded of the power…
The longer the course of a long-drawn election, the coarser the language gets. The strain is starting to tell in Uttar Pradesh. Both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah have certainly raised the pitch. Shah said hooligans (presumably from the ruling Samajwadi Party) would be hanged by their feet.…
There are some remarkable similarities—and dissimilarities—between Narendra Modi and Donald Trump. Both men ran insurgent presidential campaigns that upended conventional political structures (I use ‘presidential’ advisedly for Modi; does the Bharatiya Janata Party matter any longer to our prime minister, when all around us people refer to his government as ‘Modi sarkar’?). Both men were…
Brushing up on some history, I read about how powerful dynasties in the 8th and 9th centuries fought themselves into exhaustion over the kingdom of Kannauj in north India, oblivious to the first Arab invaders who conquered Sindh in 712CE. Today, the prize of Uttar Pradesh is being fought over by three modern armies: Prime…
President Barack Obama delivered his final State of the Union speech at 9 pm in Washington and New York on Tuesday. That is the same prime time every evening when we Indians endure multiple SOTUs emanating in hot gusts from our television screens. Americans are luckier. They get to hear a SOTU oration just once…
Aa no bhadraha Krikava yantu vishwataha (Let noble thoughts come to us from all sides). It seems fitting to look ahead at 2017 with this 3,500-year-old invocation from the Rig Veda as we try to see beyond the seismic waves of change that came at us over the past twelve months. Terrorism. Syria. Aleppo. Brexit.…
Most of us ordinary mortals who work for scant rewards and only wish to enjoy, undisturbed, the fruits of our labour, are caught up in a war that we do not even realise had been declared on our behalf. This war is ideological and political, although it wears the sheep’s clothing of fighting for India’s…
Ernest Hemingway wrote more than once for the Toronto Daily Star on the absurdity and tragedy of German hype-rinflation after the Treaty of Versailles sealed Germany’s defeat in World War I. In a September 1922 report, he described how he and his wife exchanged 90 US cents for 670 marks on a visit to the…
It was ironical but fitting, with the rising belligerence around us, that the best thing Prime Minister Narendra Modi could do for India was the electric-shock treatment he administered on the evening of November 8. You could not have asked for a better drill in disaster preparedness. People rushed out late that night to fill…
In the preface to his 1995 book ‘How Good People Make Tough Choices’, ethicist Rushworth M. Kidder wrote that when he interviewed twenty-two leading thinkers around the world about the challenges, they saw looming in the 21st century, six themes stood out. Five of them were not surprising: the nuclear threat, environmental degradation, the North-South…
Early this week I attended a talk on Nation Branding by David Reibstein, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School. Nation branding is the perception people have of a country, whether they visit it, buy from it, or invest in it. For their 2016 Best Countries report, Reibstein and his associates surveyed 16,200 business…
On September 18, a young racehorse won a scorching victory at the Sha Tin racecourse in Hong Kong. After loitering the entire race, the horse rocketed through the final 400 meters in 21.44 seconds, the fastest time in 7,000 races. He made his rags-to-riches owner, Kerm Din, famous. The name of the three-year-old gelding…
As usual, after a major terrorist attack, we have had a few days of jingoism. One journalist tweeted that “this India’ has moved on from strategic restraint. Television anchors burst a few blood vessels, urging retaliatory attacks after Uri ”and’ surgical strikes’ across the Line of Control. A senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) functionary recasts…
I woke up before dawn today to an email from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office. It listed his major activities over the previous week. He had been typically busy: just before he left for Hangzhou, where he chaired a special BRICS meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit, Modi granted a soft-focus television interview…
Spain has embraced and subsumed its Islamic past, and this holds lessons for India, where we are debasing our historical sites- a few month ago the Taj Mahal was seen turning green literally… History is fascinating. It always circles around. A lot of history is about culture and knowledge. It is also about the gaining…
Maybe I’m starting to see ghosts in dark corners. Why else do we have Mahant Avaidyanath, the late head of the Gorakhnath Temple in Gorakhpur, being celebrated every time an election in the Hindi heartland is round the corner? It does not take an anniversary for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government to celebrate the…
There is nobody left in the Valley with the moral authority, the stature and the courage to stand and speak to the angry mobs. The last man who could have, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, died nearly 34 years ago. All of us view the past through a very limiting lens. We move the glass over people…
And time yet for a hundred indecisions. And for a hundred visions and revisions—TS Eliot And time yet to revel in a plentiful monsoon, never mind that food prices continue to rise, and tomatoes now cost more than Rs 100 a kilo. There have been several good government decisions in the past few weeks. Reforms…
A senior official who is a member of the inner Gandhi circle told me Modi’s chaiwalla origin appeals to Americans, who love nothing better than a Horatio Alger-ish story of a rise from humble origins, through hard work and determination, to a lofty height Around the time Prime Minister Narendra Modi was delivering one of…
Modi can smoothly segue from pugnacious to presidential, and after two years of his ubiquitousness he can even appear statesmanlike in comparison with U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte, the president-elect of the Philippines. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on June 8, he will…
Why the regional thoroughbreds are the real winners in the assembly election sweepstakes The scene for India’s regional politics was scripted by Conjeevaram Natarajan Annadurai in 1967. The screenwriter and playwright led his Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam to victory in Tamil Nadu (then Madras state), riding to power on resurgent Tamil nationalism and an anti-Hindi agitation. …
While we listlessly wait in century-high temperatures for the slightly delayed monsoon, listening to Minister X or Bureaucrat Y talking up the numbers, the question again is: Who are you trying to impress? Life’s but a walking shadow,a poor playerThat struts and frets his hour upon the stageAnd then is heard no more: it is…
Twice in the past two and a half years, the Supreme Court has ruled with a 19th-century mindset on vital 21st-century issues affecting personal freedom using criminal and penal codification that was enacted by India’s British rulers. The Indian Penal Code of 1860 was first drafted by Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1837, and its enactment…
It says something for the Congress that Sonia Gandhi has been its president for nearly 18 years, a longer, unbroken stretch than anybody in the family she married into. Night after night on our TV screens, the usual suspects, aging Congress leaders, pick apart the chicken entrails of this middleman’s diary entry or that arms…
Why is Maharashtra in such a mess? It has been written many a times about the abysmal state of agriculture in India. There is no doubt at all that vote-bank manipulation, corruption and the callous indifference of generations of politicians have severely crippled the farm sector. Maharashtra is the prize exhibit A train carrying 2.5…
Our farmers don’t have time to debate patriotism. Rural distress triggers migration, farmers’ suicides. Angry farmers are bound to hit Modi where it hurts him most – at the ballot box. If agriculture does not look up soon, the BJP will have a tough time winning the make-or-break state of UP. The squat and circular…