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…
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…
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…
The Puranas say it took the gods and demons a thousand years, with some help from Vishnu who took on the form of a tortoise, to churn the Milky Ocean before it yielded the divine nectar (amrit). The samudra manthan also produced a deadly poison, halahala, which Shiva obligingly consumed. The churning of India’s education…
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…
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: what about implementation? Over the past four years, the Bharatiya Janata…
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 less-cash economy now? Authorities had to scramble to…
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, on our western and northern borders. India’s 2018-19 defence budget totalled Rs 2.82 trillion,…
Next week, when PM Narendra Modi makes his fifth Independence Day speech from the Red Fort, he might want to remind us that in 2022, the New India he has promised will arrive in more ways than one. Just four years from now, the World Bank predicts, India will jump past China to hit 1.411…
To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man’s injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man’s superior. – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi Male-dominated. Super-hierarchical. Forgiving. Stanford sociologist Marianne Cooper listed…
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 the continuing conundrum of why India punches far below its weight in the world’s…
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 ministry announced his visit to Rwanda, Uganda and South Africa. He will be away during the first full week of the monsoon session, which could be the last of the 16th…
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 was announced in the 2018-19 Budget and approved by the Cabinet in…
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 bit of the second type over the past two years. It’s not…
“Curiouser and curiouser” sums up India’s economy. There is little or no credit, tepid business and consumer confidence, exports are struggling, and yet gross domestic product (GDP) grew by a healthy 7.7 percent in the January-March quarter, and is seen rising by 7.4 percent in fiscal 2018-19. If you read the Reserve Bank of India’s…
The sub-text to the debate on simultaneous elections is that BJP wants to further centralise power. In 2012, watching Manmohan Singh struggling with a disorderly coalition, an obstreperous cabinet, and a host of powerful state chief ministers, I wrote that he was the lone prime minister in a nation of presidents. In 2014, on the…
One of the smartest things Prime Minister Narendra Modi did after coming to power four years ago was to appoint diehard loyalists as state governors. They were either beholden to him or to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). When the Congress was on top of the heap, it routinely…
Can momentum towards holding simultaneous elections to Lok Sabha, state assemblies be achieved in one fell swoop? The momentum towards holding simultaneous elections to the Lok Sabha and state assemblies is growing, but can this be achieved in one fell swoop? If it is done in stages, it may take until 2024 at least to…
Take a deep breath and don’t run for the door Reading An Account of the Great Fear, or Grande Peur, that swept across France in July and August of 1789, I was struck by the description of what triggered the French Revolution: “economic concerns, rural panic and the power of rumour” With the BSE Sensex…
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, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, neither odour nor perfume—just strange, and curiously exciting. “Superintendent, what’s that smell? Casey noticed it too, the moment Sven opened the door.’ Armstrong hesitated. Then he…
We need our institutions as much as we need our democracy Narendra Modi’s first term in office will be bracketed by malodorous stand-offs with two governors of the Reserve Bank of India. The bad blood between the central bank and the finance ministry is just one of the stains blotting the government’s copy-book as it…
At least in the United States, the light of a free press still shines bright The Washington post adopted this four-word slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” in February 2017, its first in 140 years. It was used by its owner Jeff Bezos in an interview to the paper’s managing editor several months earlier, before Donald…
Independence Day is a good excuse for some economic chest-thumping. We should be proud that lndia is a free-enterprise democracy. Imagine the world’s burden if we were a basket case of 1.35 billion poor people. We may complain about inequality and the disproportionate number of billionaires, but it is possible to rise from rags to…
Importune your Maker, but not with impunity My family cracks up every time we watch Noises off, the rambunctious 1992 comedy. Maybe we find it funnier because we live in such a noisy nation. As India enters its 72nd year of freedom, we should declare independence from noise, and vow to liberate ourselves from religious…
Our government owns one of the world’s biggest databases. What does it mean? Annadata means “Bestower of food” – a synonym for god. In some Indian languages, Anna means older brother, so you can also take my headline as ‘Big Brother Data’. Not long ago there was spirited debate on whether or not’ data is…
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 listed by the World Health Organization are in India. The Bharatiya Janata Party controls eight of them. Our politicians-ought to rise above the next election and make sure we do…
Strong, sustained growth is possible—if we don’t trip ourselves up We can hope that in the run-up to the next general election we will not suffer the type of jolts to our nervous systems that hit us in November 2016 and July 2017 with demonetisation and the introduction of the GST. “Those two shocks seem…
We can barely keep count of ourselves, leave alone migrants The Fates Of the four million people whose names did not appear in the ‘complete draft’ of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam hinge on whether they can (again try to) prove their identities. I spoke with several Assamese friends and experts, and…
Indians got the vote even before they got citizenship To be precise, 173,213,635 Voters aged 21 years or above. That was the total on the electoral rolls published, constituency by constituency, between the first week of September and 15th November, 1951, about a year before independent India’s first general election. The 1951 Census counted 180,307,684…
Will we get our act together, or continue to muddle in middle income mediocrity? So let’s see: 2018 is supposed to be a good year for India. We have low inflation, the monsoon may be normal, manufacturing is finally picking up , salarymen (and-women) are looking at good pay rises, and a litre of petrol…
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 Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?) and marvelled a new at the infinite capacity of a child’s brain. I’m sure you’ve read that the pace…
Our history of Karnataka-style perfidy goes back a long way The wise ones among us are all ganit shastris (Mathematicians) and love crunching our election results which seem more frequent than our economic indicators. Politics is street theatre for us, and vote shares mean more than batting averages. A switch to simultaneous elections to parliament…
63 million ‘missing’ women: we need a pink revolution Look Carefully at all the Headlines, screaming or otherwise, that are popping up these days about corruption. How many of them feature women? Study after study has found over the years that more members of the ‘fairer sex’ in parliament and in the top echelons of…
The only antidotes to fake news are truth and commonsense Start exercise your smartphone thumb, because the next big election will be fought on our mobiles. The latest Internet and Mobile Association of India survey says 86.5 per cent of users access the Internet via mobiles and smartphones. That works out to over 430 million…
Like the clever taxpayer, it will wag the system There is no loophole that has not met an Indian taxpayer. A Hindi proverb says you can never straighten a dog’s tail (kutte ki poonch…). Don’t blame the poor soul who is using adaptation techniques that would put other evolutionary survivors to shame. The Smithsonian lists…
Time to stop being a semi-skilled nation In India if you book a plumber to come and rescue you from a flooded bathroom, chances are you will get a call at 11 a.m. the following day asking you to repeat your complaint or checking on directions to your address. If you sputter in rage, the…
Shutting Kanpur’s tanneries has not helped the Ganga much Hell for leather means to run very fast, but the leather industry in and around Kanpur has nowhere to run. Hundreds of tanneries and manufacturing units in Kanpur’s Jajmau quarter, and the clusters of Banthar and Unnau as you drive towards Lucknow, are tottering as they…