Postscript

Investigation or brow-beating?

There’s something seriously wrong with the heads of the top brass in Central government agencies such as the CBI, Enforcement Directorate and Income Tax Department, who summon and question citizens for eight-ten hours at a stretch to unearth alleged suspected crimes and misdemeanours.

Take the case of K. Kavitha, MP and daughter of Telangana chief minister […]

Silent spectators

Even if they read the tragic story of Rajendra Tukaram Chavan, a Nashik (Maharashtra)-based farmer who travelled 70 km to the Solapur APMC (Agriculture Produce Marketing Centre) to sell 512 kg of painstakingly grown onions, readers of this top-selling daily — (ToI, 24/2) — overwhelmingly indifferent, urban middle class citizens — are unlikely to lose […]

Simpleton leader

There’s a deep and deepening sickness within middle class India. It is prompting this 300 million-strong and growing class to speed like demented lemmings towards self-destruction. Whenever an individual of Indian origin makes it big abroad — as in the latest case of Ajay Banga, former CEO of Mastercard, selected by US President Joe Biden […]

Multiplying Mir Jafars

It’s well established that British rule over India began with the victory of Robert Clive, manager of a trading outpost (‘factory’) of the East India Company in the Battle of Plassey (1757). At Plassey 3,000 Brit and Indian troops hired to provide security to the factory, defeated the 50,000-strong army of Siraj-ud-Daula, Nawab of Bengal. […]

Sino-India paradox

Some television news anchors and bristling retired army brass seem to be itching for a border skirmish, if not war, with troops of China’s People’s Liberation Army massed along India’s 3,488 km unsettled border with China stretching across almost uninhabited terrain from Kashmir in the north-west, to Arunachal Pradesh in the north-east. But the national […]

Founding fathers error

Any citizen of India with a conscience cannot help but weep for the unfortunate condition of the industrious, uncomplaining and continuously short-changed people of the eastern state of Bihar (pop.104 million). Despite a mountain of evidence that liquor prohibition has failed in every country and society since it was promulgated in the US in the […]

Changed perspective

Less than a decade ago, one read and heard proclamations of India’s tourism potential with a big dose of scepticism, if not derision. The plain truth was that beyond the front gates of 5-star hostelries, India was too chaotic and filthy, and if tourists ventured further into the hinterland, bad roads, unhygienic restaurants and dirty […]

Extraordinary ego

CHRISTMAS EVE VIDEO INTERVIEW between articulate and incisive interviewer Karan Thapar and celebrated NDTV journalist Ravish Kumar has elicited much appreciation within the chattering classes, particularly leftists and liberal fellow travellers. Kumar’s claim to fame is that as an anchor of NDTV’s Hindi channel, he had established an excellent reputation for fearlessly speaking truth to […]

Soft power opportunity

THE ADVENT OF OTT (OVER-THE-TOP) choice-based cinema and television series from around the world has given a new lease of life to India’s floundering film industry, Bollywood in particular. With well-scripted and intelligent movies produced by cinema and entertainment corporations such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar among others accessible to a new generation of Indian […]

Killjoys running amok

A MULTIPLYING TRIBE OF KILLJOYS IS ruining the social life of India’s teenagers and young adults whose number is estimated at 300 million countrywide.

This lament is provoked by a news report in Bengaluru’s Times of India (December 15) that a search of the handbag of a young woman student of a junior college in the […]

Second fiddle editors

FIFTY YEARS AGO, INDIA’S FREE PRESS WAS indeed the fourth estate of the Republic. Powerful editors such as Frank Moraes, Sham Lal, Girilal Jain, Khushwant Singh and C.R. Irani strode the national stage. However in 1975, when prime minister Indira Gandhi declared India’s first — and thus far only — State of Emergency and imposed […]

Civic dead horses

UBIQUITOUS POTHOLES; MONSOON FLOODING; traffic jams and gridlocks; power and water shortages; runaway omnibuses; no parking space; itchy-palmed traffic policemen and municipal corporation employees. To that list add noxious air quality and millions of viruses looking for warm bodies. The weight of evidence is overwhelming: 21st century India’s chaotic, ill-governed cities are in meltdown.

As slums […]

Atonement & absolution

THERE’S NO SHORTAGE OF MARXIST AND socialist intellectuals within Indian academia ready, willing and able to argue that European powers of 18-19th centuries plundered and pillaged third world countries so thoroughly — the Indian subcontinent in particular — that we haven’t been able to recover our pre-colonial glory and momentum. These faux intellectuals conveniently forget […]

Excellence disqualifications

LIKE THE BOURBON KINGS OF 16TH CENTURY France, members of the opposition Congress party refuse to learn from history. Despite this vintage political party (estb.1885) being roundly trounced in two successive General Elections (2014 & 2019), Congress has rejected the party presidency bid of erudite and charismatic Dr. Shashi Tharoor, former assistant secretary-general of the […]

New plagiarism high

ALMOST A DECADE AGO, ONE ANIL SHARMA, a general manager of this publication, resigned and started a rival magazine under the name and style of Education Today. Initially published as a print magazine in which school principals and leaders wrote their own encomiums, it currently bills itself as an education portal. However, its main business […]

Unguided Hindi missile

THERE’S A RECKLESS, BULL-IN-A-CHINA-SHOP defining characteristic of the top leadership of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in power at the Centre since 2014. On Hindi Diwas (September 14), heir-apparent Union home minister Amit Shah resurrected the dormant issue of the country’s national language by issuing an appeal to all state governments to communicate with the […]

Small minded worthies

The ONGOING slanging match between the AAP (Aam Aadmi Party) and the BJP/NDA Central government over the status of 2,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees who fled ethnic and religious persecution by the brutal military regime in neighbouring Myanmar (aka Burma) and are living in pitiful makeshift slums of the country’s administrative capital, is indicative of the […]

Wanted: 2 As x 1000

Despite China which was relatively underdeveloped compared to India on October 1, 1949 — when the Communist Party of China (CPC) established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing, and Chairman Mao Zedong famously declared that “China has stood up”— having overtaken India in the global development race after it took the capitalist road […]

True nation builder

The demise of Rakesh Jhunjhunwala (RJ), the ‘Big Bull’ of the Bombay and National Stock Exchanges, on August 14 is a big setback for the Indian economy. This statement is likely to invite derision and contempt of eggheads in academia and the overwhelming majority of citizens who believe that India’s century-old stock market is little […]

Bank frauds boom

The small minority of regular readers of this page and publication in general are undoubtedly aware that your editor is more than disenchanted with India’s 256 Central and equal number of state government promoted public sector enterprises (PSEs).

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that ignorance of ancient India’s glorious tradition of free enterprise which […]

Cast-iron corruption

Perhaps the greatest beneficiaries of the Silicon Valley of India i.e, Bengaluru’s real estate boom are the neta-babu (politician-bureaucrat) brotherhood and corners-cutting lawyers, who have accumulated massive fortunes from the maze of documents required to purchase and register property.

On July 20, ten teams of the Karnataka Lok Ayukta (ombudsman) made surprise swoops on the offices […]

Greatest PSE leader

“Each man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind,” wrote 16th-17th century English poet John Donne. The demise in Chennai on June 26 of V. Krishnamurthy (1925-2022) has certainly diminished the nation. It marks the end of the most distinguished leader of several show-piece Central government public sector enterprises (PSEs) promoted with great […]

Clever apology

Although the mighty British Empire on which the sun never set has been reduced to the status of a lonely nation exiled to the periphery of Europe following Brexit in 2020, there is something admirable about the tenacity with which Brits are hanging in there by drawing on their indisputably momentous history and soft power. […]

Inappropriate propriety

The seemingly placid implementation pace of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which has provoked EW’s July cover story, is deceptive, according to a deep-dive investigation conducted by the Delhi-based daily Indian Express (June 21).

Twenty-four obscure academics with strong links with the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), the ideological mentor organisation of the Bharatiya Janata Party […]

SBI surprise

Readers acquainted with the voluminous features written by your editor in disparate publications including Business India, Businessworld and EducationWorld (estb.1999) are certain to be well-aware that I’m not an admirer of the country’s 256 Central government public sector enterprises (PSEs). And an equivalent number of PSEs promoted by state governments across the country. Continuous investment […]

Broken Windows state

The once clean, green and well-governed state of Karnataka is fast-transforming into a Broken Windows society. Researched and developed by American academics James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982, Broken Windows theory posits that if civic neglect and petty crimes are unpunished, there will be an outbreak of serious crimes and criminality in society.

In […]

Sports & socialism

The Indian badminton squad’s maiden victory in the Thomas Cup final staged in Bangkok last month marked a landmark in the history of Indian sport. In the final, the Indian men’s squad led by Kidambi Srikanth recorded a 3-0 triumph over Indonesia, whose players have won the international Thomas Cup tourney introduced in 1949, a […]

PSEs ball & chain

With the sale of the public sector Bharat Petroleum Corp postponed indefinitely and the Centre having slashed its disinvestment receipts target from Rs.1.75 lakh crore in 2021-22 to Rs.65,000 crore this year, socialist India’s public sector enterprises (PSEs) look set to remain a perpetual ball and chain hobbling the Indian economy.

According to the Public Enterprises […]

Graft epidemic reflections

Over the past 75 years since independence, an amoral lumpen bourgeoisie with rural/small-town origins has risen to the very top of the establishment and entrenched itself in the national and state administrative capitals.

How else can one explain the conduct of Karnataka’s rural development & panchayat raj minister K.S. Eshwarappa and his heartless reaction to death […]

Rip Van Winkle comrades

Like the French Bourbon dynasty (1589-1793) which forgot nothing and learned nothing, at its 23rd party congress convened in Kannur (Kerala) on April 6-10, leaders and delegates of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) indulged in familiar anti-business and privatisation rhetoric reminiscent of the 1960-70s when the comrades were a force to reckon with in […]

Greed blown dream

The Bridgerton dream of upper-middle class and elite Indians enamoured with this OTT serial broadcast on the streaming platform Netflix, is over. The Peter principle has caught up with Rishi Sunak, the Winchester and Oxford educated son of Indian emigres from East Africa and husband of India-born heiress Akshata Murthy, daughter of Infosys Technologies Ltd […]

Failed success

Unsurprisingly, the maiden public issue of the public sector Life Insurance Corporation of India (estb.1956), which is likely to be launched within the next few months, is generating heated excitement in the stock market and within India’s fast expanding investors’ community. The cash-strapped Union government, the sole owner of the corporation, is set to offer […]

Strategic mistake

Commendable facts checking by several online news portals, including Quint have refuted social media reports that the BJP won 165 of its 255 seats in the recently concluded Uttar Pradesh legislative election by less than 2,000 votes, and that the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) — a political party promoted by the Hyderabad-based Asaduddin Owaisi […]

Ingrate incumbent

Several huge ads featured on March 8 in almost all dailies including the pink papers in remembrance of the late Aditya Vikram Birla (1943-95), proclaimed the judges, juries and awardees of the 22nd Aditya Birla Scholarship Programme.

In the early years of the new millennium, this struggling publication was on the favoured list of Industry House, […]

People’s pulse?

One major argument advanced in favour of the country’s political class which has divided society on religious and caste lines to win political advantage, and has wrecked the Indian economy with its inorganic socialism experiments, is that they have the pulse of the people. If so, how will apologists for duly elected people’s representatives, explain […]

Bhagat’s broadside

There’s an inherent paradox in best-selling author and newspaper columnist Chetan Bhagat. Although he writes thought-provoking and readable 1,000 word newspaper columns, he also writes puerile and lazy 60,000-80,000 word English language novels which no intelligent or discerning reader can stomach. If his novels are best-sellers as his publishers proclaim, it’s an indictment of the […]

Fairweather friend

As the renowned English poet John Donne (1572-1631) observed, every man’s death diminishes us. More so if the man is a great leader who has contributed to the public good and welfare of the general populace. Rahul Bajaj who passed away on January 13 at his home in Pune, was undoubtedly a great industrialist and […]

Hindi imperialism revival

A January 17 decision of the Telangana government to decree Inglish the medium of instruction in its 30,000 primary-secondary government schools statewide, should be welcomed by all committed to the unity amid diversity aspiration of post-independence India. Earlier in 2019, the YSR Congress government of neighbouring Andhra Pradesh had also decreed Inglish as the medium […]

Elephantine question

A January 23 news item to the effect that a Gujarati-Indian family of four including two children, froze to death in sub-zero temperatures on the Canada-US border while attempting to illegally migrate to the US, has been reported in a surprisingly matter-of-fact manner in Indian media. As an inevitable accident.

Yet the elephantine question that neither […]

Soviet-style unperson

The ravages of several waves of the Covid-19 pandemic notwithstanding, the Mumbai-based TCS (Tata Consultancy Services) Ltd, seems to be going great guns. The management of India’s most valuable company by market capitalisation (Rs.13.9 lakh crore) recently announced a massive Rs.18,000 crore equity shares buy-back programme. Moreover, it’s all set to become the title sponsor […]