THE MONTH GONE BY has certainly had something for everyone. Apart from elections, people have had to come to grips with phenomena ranging from Board exams to the Budget session in Parliament. It was interesting to see Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee quote Shakespeare repeatedly during the session;...
WHEN AT A RIPE AGE of 80, Kushal Pal Singh (K.P. Singh), Chairman of DLF, decided to pick the pen for an autobiography (Whatever the Odds published by Harper Collins India), he did his fellow citizens a good turn. We could all take a leaf out of this man’s journey. From his days as a village lad i...
Coalition Compulsions derails Railway Budget TMC pulls reins
BUDGET\\ The Railway Budget 2012 presented by Former Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi hiked passenger fares for the first time in 10 years. Interestingly, before the masses could react to the hike, key coalition ally Trinamool Congress (TMC) decided to pull the chain and bring the Manmohan Singh’s ...
UN Human Rights Council Seeks Lanka Probe India Takes Clear Stand During Vote
INTERNATIONAL\\ The United Nations’s top human rights body—the Human Rights Council—called on Sri Lanka to ‘investigate alleged war crimes committed by both sides during the country’s 26-year conflict with Tamil Tiger rebels. The UN Human Rights Council approved a US-backed resolution that...
Did Fidel Castro let JFK be assassinated?
Explosive revelations of a former CIA operative INTERNATIONAL\\ Did Fidel Castro (above) know that the late US President John F Kennedy was to be assassinated? According to a new book—Castro’s Secrets; The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine—about the 1963 murder, he did. The book slated fo...
Little Master Finally Hits His 100th Ton
CRICKET\\ On March 16, 2012, at Mirpur in Bangladesh, Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar or the Little Master as he is called by his fans, scored a century of international centuries—51 in Tests and 49 in ODIs. As far as this record goes, Tendulkar’s closest rival remains the Australian cricketer Ricky Pon...
The 2012 Assembly Polls Uncork a Bottle of Surprises Samajwadi Party sweeps polls in Uttar Pradesh
POLL\\ The 2012 Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Goa, Uttarakhand and Manipur, came as a mixed bag for national parties, especially the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with no clear winners emerging in any state. However, it was the verdict in Uttar Pradesh that came as the major ...
Asia has a role in saving the planet by reshaping ideas of capitalism
CHANDRAN NAIR: My parents were both migrants from Kerala. My father came as a young man in his twenties and my mother as a nine-year-old with her older brother. During my early years, the only things I knew of India were through the customs and practices at home in Malaysia; we had a strong Indian c...
Welcome to the “2.0 times”. It is an interesting period: now everyone has a point to argue and enough ways to voice opinions. There is freedom of speech in its absolute avatar—the impact of which can be assessed by the fact that even the Prime Minister’s Office is engaging with the average I...
Can mainstream politics solve the conundrum
NAXALITE REBELS NEED to be tackled with mainstream political activity, not just development projects and repression by security forces. This new approach for trying to end, or at least contain, India’s most serious internal security problem is being pushed by Jairam Ramesh, Minister for Rural Deve...
Feminist, publisher and writer Urvashi Butalia recounts her days in Ambala, Delhi University, a serendipitous flight to Hawaii, and little chances that led to Zubaan I grew up in Ambala and spent the first 10 years of my life there. My parents moved to Ambala when The Tribune moved from Lahore to ...
A closer look at NCTC Who will Blink First?
Blink First? The National Counter-terrorism Centre or NCTC, the proposed antiterror agency, has become a bone of contention between the Centre and Opposition-ruled states (plus some ruled by allies such as Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal). Opposing groups believe that the NCTC encroaches upon their l...
Liberalism accompanied with a surge in conservatism IT is increasingly difficult to escape labels. One is either a liberal or not, and along with that description comes a whole set of ready made beliefs. The very act of being able to slot yourself in these neat categories, brings along with an abil...
Goonj does not just give clothes to the needy. It gives them a bit of their dignity back “Drama or fake photography is not allowed”—the moment I enter Goonj’s cloth processing centre, the poster grabs my attention. That is a rather unusual message right at the entrance of an NGO, I say to m...
Go behind the headlines of Baghdad, London and Washington, with a journalist at his criminal-writing best THERE ARE thriller writers, and then, there are those who take readers behind the enemy lines and then proceed to blur all such lines—leaving them confused. Michael Robotham’s The Wreckage...
And All is Said: Memoir of a Home Divided
Memoir, biography, social history and tribute, Zareer Masani’s book is a good read at many levels MEMOIRS AND BIOGRAPHIES only touch a chord when they are unflinchingly honest in tone and full of revelations of people and the times they live in. Judged in this light, Zareer Masani’s And All is...
A Different Kind of a Road Trip
The land of Bedouins, Jordan seems familiar yet fascinating and worthy of revisits All roads may not lead to Jordan—but they should. Admittedly an unlikely choice for a road trip, Jordan fulfills all the criteria one seeks for in a road trip. For instance, highways. There are three main ones in J...
Writer, anchor and now channel CEO; it’s all about gastronomical art for Sanjeev Kapoor In their journey through life people often make plans and then see them morph into something else altogether. Poet John Keats wished to become a doctor, Sachin Tendulkar wanted to be a tennis player while Mas...
