By quashing the proceedings in three cases against M.F. Husain, the Delhi High Court has sent a strong message against cultural bigotry and moral vigilantism. The order provides a measure of welcome relief for Indias most celebrated painter, who has suffered...
Social discrimination is often subtle and attitudinal, but in Uthapuram village of Madurai district in Tamil Nadu it was embodied for nearly two decades in a 600-metre wall separating Dalits from caste Hindus. A report in The Hindu on April 17...
Mahmoud Ahmadinejads visit signifies Irans desire to move forward in its ties with India. Equally, it underscores our jettisoning of an unhappy interregnum when we adopted a neoconservative view of Iran.
The U.K. Home Secretary is trying to get the House of Lords to annul the release order of a Muslim preacher described as Osama bin Ladens right-hand man in Europe.
A top German industrialist bemoans the lack of skilled engineers and the need to bring in an increasing number of them from overseas to sustain growth.
The Supreme Courts suggestion to the Centre to explore the possibility of an alternative alignment or any other route for the Sethusamudram Shipping Channel Project without demolishing the Ramar Sethu (May 9) is welcome. It is a positive development for all...
The demolition of a part of the Uthapuram wall in Madurai which separated Dalits from the rest of the village and denied them access to common utilities thanks to the concerted efforts of The Hindu , the CPI(M) and...
Egypts minister of trade and industry Rachid Mohamed Rachid was in the Capital recently to seek enhanced trade ties with India. There are a number of similarities between Egypt and India, providing ample scope for bilateral trade and investment flows, he...
India continues to be the flavour of the year and the phrase rising great power is heady praise for a one billion collective that has yet to shed its colonial DNA. Hence any kind of accolade and affirmation from the west...
Addressing over 700 members of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) at a conference in the capital, management guru C K Prahalad outlined his vision of India at 75. According to him, India in 2022 will have 30 firms in the...
C K Prahalad must be the most optimistic man around to predict that India will have 10 Nobel laureates and 10 per cent of global trade by 2022. This country could gallop and achieve so much success in such a short...
There has been a lively debate about the relative merits of rules versus discretion in the context of defining for the RBI an inflation target that it will be bound by when conducting monetary policy. While there are differences, an important...
A few days ago, the citizenry in Mukherjee Nagar, a middle-class neighbourhood of North Delhi, literally set fire to some power transmission and distribution equipment. By doing so, they lit a metaphorical fire under the local government, which would prefer to...
What does it mean when we read that 22 million Russians died on the eastern front in the Second World War and 25 million disappeared in the Stalinist purges, never to be heard again? These are terrifying figures. And there are...
No matter the sneers, Rahul Gandhi's gesture of dining at a Dalit village in Amethi was of undeniable symbolic value. At the risk of offending votaries of the other Gandhi, I will even compare its propagandist (in the best sense of...
Last month, the wheat fields in Punjab stretched in amber-tinged waves as far as the eye could see, promising bountiful harvests. Nothing hinted at the grave crisis that has gripped the state, driving farmers to suicide and unemployed youth to the...
I made the biggest mistake of my life when I let Pankaj drop out of school," Mukti sighed. I lent a sympathetic ear, for I knew that she'd just left her sixteen-year-old at a government de-addiction centre, and didn't know when...
The Delhi high court has quashed criminal proceedings against M F Husain for allegedly hurting public sentiments through some of his nude paintings. The court has rightly labelled these charges "baseless". But, more than the verdict it's the manner in which...
The clash between Union health minister A Ramadoss and 66-year-old director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, P Venugopal, tarnished the image of India's top medical research institution, cleaved employee loyalties, created indiscipline and unrest and left patients short-changed....
With the IPL reaching its half-way mark, it is safe to say that so far the tournament has been a hit. Most matches have played to packed stadiums, the games have got excellent TV ratings and cricket fans - many of...
Everyone loves making lists and everyone loves reading lists. So list-makers, in theory at least, cannot fail. Yet do they always succeed? When it comes to objective lists, there's no problem: computing a rich list, for example, is a matter of...
"Where is your boarding pass?" the security official demanded of me at the Hyderabad airport. "Do you have a printed e-ticket?" another thundered. I scurried back to the airline counter outside to sort out matters and the lady at the window...
The directions issued by the Supreme Court on Thursday in the Ram Setu case are most welcome for they show that it has taken cognisance of the sensitivities involved in the matter. The Supreme Court has rightly sought to know about...
With the successful test firing of Agni III off the coast of Orissa on Wednesday, India now has a long-range nuclear capable ballistic missile that is almost ready for induction as a crucial component of the country's strategic arsenal. The Agni...
Ten years ago this Sunday, India stealthily conducted three nuclear tests at Pokhran, sending shockwaves around the world. The 'Powerful Five' and Janus-faced moralists like Canada and Australia were aghast and almost disbelieving -- not so much because India had decided...
Mahavir organised the world on the basis of relativity. He said that the streams of oneness and differences flow together. In this flow of co-existence, there is no space for the "either-you-or-I" thought.
EMS Namboodiripad admitted loud and clear that Communists had joined the Indian parliamentary democratic mainstream to destroy it from within. This week, Somnath Chatterjee reminded us of that 51-year-old unfinished agenda
To understand Somnath Chatterjee's authoritarianism better, it is necessary to recognise that Indian Communists are into parliamentary democracy only to destroy it from within -- a line first articulated by Namboodiripad and upheld for nearly 30 years by HA Halim in...
Most articles titled such would harp on about how wine must be drunk and not just revered. Wait a minute! Thats exactly what I wanted to do. Let me at least then try and put a twist on it.
Gurgaon is a modern-day marvel, in every sense. Almost from nowhere, concrete buildings cropped up on the barren fields of Gurgaon in the late 1990s. The concrete maze, running acres after acres, became an enviable neighbour to Delhi.
It is a mystery as to why when India is really surging ahead as a nation in the international arena, the 150th anniversary of the 1857 rebellion has been passed over in such an unceremonious fashion.
In a country where the gap between an idea and its execution is often quite large, the most dangerous ideas are those which sound good in theory but have little chance of working in practice. The quickly-mangled scheme for the Bus...
O n May 10, the 150 th anniversary celebrations of 1857 will draw to a close. What has been done is a moot point -- people are more interested in what was not done. More so, because the government pledged big...
O n the 10th anniversary of Pokhran-II test, nuclear reactors in India are operating at 50 percent capacity.This does not appear to have attracted the attention of those who take pride in having declared India as a nuclear weapon state. While...
yeh mera khoon hai! Mimoh and Mithun. pic/ rakesh DAve Last night, at the premiere of Mithun Chakroborty’s son Mimoh’s debut film Jimmy, at Cinemax in Andheri, the who’s who of B-town was present. Barring the Bachchans. Mithun personally called up...
pick of the lot: Anushka Sharma The hunt for the female lead opposite Shah Rukh in Aditya Chopra’s c has ended. He has cast a Bangalore girl opposite SRK. Her name is Anushka Sharma.
I s it true that marriages are totally arranged between strangers in India?" I am often asked by foreigners at parties. Along with curiosity about the caste system and the significance of the bindi on the forehead, it is one of...
The pictures and news about the Type 094 ' Jin ' submarine are not new, however. From at least late 1990s and more concretely from 2004, these developments have been reported widely, including the three tests of 8,000 km range, solid-propellant...
ILLUSTRATION / SAMEER PAWAR The Mumbai Crime Branch is facing an odd situation. There are too many shooters and few hardcore criminals left in the city. This phenomenon did not occur overnight. It required hours of hard work, to get rid...
Diana will solve it! Write to Diana at diana@mid-day.com, or fax her on 24150009. You can also post letters to Dear Diana, Mid Day, Peninsula Centre, Dr S S Rao Road, opp Mahatma Gandhi Hospital, Parel, Mumbai 400012
Yeh mera khoon hai! Mimoh and Mithun. Pic/ Rakesh Dave Last night, at the premiere of Mithun Chakroborty’s son Mimoh’s debut film Jimmy, at Cinemax in Andheri, the who’s who of B-town was present. Barring the Bachchans. Mithun personally called up...
pick of the lot: Anushka Sharma The hunt for the female lead opposite Shah Rukh in Aditya Chopra’s c has ended. He has cast a Bangalore girl opposite SRK. Her name is Anushka Sharma.
Pristine: A typical sublime Austrian village where time trudges along lazily and reluctantly Scene: A quiet pristine little village tucked somewhere in the Austrian Alpine region where Google maps still haven’t reached. Life goes on in the same unhurried pace the...
With a fluttering heart and a gentle purr of the engine, Rohini my wife, Kooch our Santro Xing, and I embarked on a ‘Discover India’ road trip across India.
You can backstab and mudsling all you want. But the impression it gives the onlooker can be your downfall. LiFE@WORK gives you a lowdown on the backstabber...
A study by Harvard reveals, about 80 per cent of the work is attributed to soft and 20 per cent to technical skills. Does India share the same statistics? iT ADDA finds out...
LONDON: S Kumars, through its subsidiary, has just acquired a controlling stake in one of Italys leading fabric manufacturers, Klopman, for an enterprise value of e70 million ($107 million). MW Unitexx S.A., a wholly-owned subsidiary of MW Corp, an S Kumars...
This refers to Alls not well with ONGC hunt and ONGC has little to show after four years of oil hunt (ET, May 7). The referred news story has compared ONGC with private players that are described as striking oil and...
While the world reels under food shortages and inflation, a strange trade liberalisation is taking place. All countries are cutting import restrictions on foodgrain while imposing restrictions on their own exports of food articles.
The 108th Constitutional Amendment Bill is yet another example of the growing gap between pious promises and actual results of government policies and legislation in India. The Bill provides for reservation on rotation basis through a lottery system, which means that...
Government first, the rest can wait". Thats the urgency of Maoists to lead a coalition government in Nepal after their stunning victory at the Constituent Assembly elections last month, from the shock and awe of which everyone, including the Maoists themselves,...
Sensex rises despite inflation, blares the newspaper headline. Sweet innocence: the cub sub-editor who arranged the heading obviously does not know that actually one reason for the buoyancy in the share market is inflation. The constituents of societys creamy layer mostly...
Sir Naked run for life in Nandigram (May 6) does not come as a shock to those familiar with the dictatorial and fascist character of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which has been ruling West Bengal for over 30...
Flesh, marble and turf are all in deep peril in Calcutta. So the courts and a few active citizens have been trying, from time to time, to rescue all three from irreversible damage. Their doggedness has been admirable but the...
When Shri Bush and Kumari Condoleezza Rice talk about rising prices of food and pass the buck of their failure to grow enough food for the American people onto the growing middle classes of what were once-upon-a-time third world countries, they...
The magician, like the trickster, is well advised not to show his hand. Salman Rushdies new novel, eight years in the making, disdains this advice with a splendid nonchalance that might well recall a Renaissance grace he omits to mention in...
Mahatma Gandhis political engagement has monopolized the attention of scholars. As a result, his real and most important concerns for instance, the constructive programme comprising swadeshi , khadi and village reconstruction have ended up being marginalized. That seems to...
A macabre sight is compulsory viewing for Turkish Cypriot children in Nicosia. School excursions take them to a house on Irfan Bey Street, where the blood-splattered bath and toilet with bullet holes are preserved in pristine condition. On a December night...
English-language publishers in India mostly started off as booksellers or distributors of British publishers before Independence. Very little original publishing was done, and most of it was confined to out-dated British texts for primary and secondary schools. Even in the late...
Generation 14 (Penguin, Rs 295) by Priya Sarukkai Chabria is told by Clone 14/54/G, a fourteenth generation clone, living in a fearsome, dystopian world. The setting is reminiscent of Oceania in George Orwells 1984 . In fact, the similarities with the...
The world is watching Bharti Airtel's audacious attempt to buy out South African telecom giant MTN keenly. The reason: it has the potential to create the second-largest mobile services network, after China Mobile, in the world.
A day after Finance Minister P Chidambaram spoke of banning futures trading in food crops in Madrid, government suited action to words, banning futures trading in chana, soya complex, rubber and potato.
Ever since the Bill seeking 33% reservation for women in all elected bodies was first introduced in Parliament almost a decade ago, the pattern remains the same.
What if science were to discover one day that all our actions are predetermined genetically or, at least, are the result of fixed earlier causes? Would our behaviour become less in accordance with the accepted principles of ethics that should ideally...
LONDON, May 8: Want to persuade a woman? Do it in person instead of taking the online route, for a new study has revealed that the fair sex responds better in face-to-face encounters, while men can be easily swayed by an...
Sunday, May 11, 2008 is the 10th anniversary of Pokharan-II. We could have said, on the eve of this anniversary, how things have changed. Things did change. But India is still back to the nuclear-strategic square one. How India managed to...
: Elections rarely resolve the most current or pressing questions of the time, or they bring muddled answers. Yet when Karnataka makes its way to the hustings tomorrow in the first of a three-phase poll process, many will hope for clarity...
: The Supreme Court has delivered health minister Anbumani Ramadoss a rap on the knuckles for trying to push through an amendment to the AIIMS Act, a piece of legislation aimed at forcibly removing AIIMS director P. Venugopal. Venugopal claimed that...
Cyclone Nargis ripped through Myanmar, leaving 22,500 dead and a million homeless. But there may be another casualty. The military junta is right in worrying that its authoritarian control may end. It has been forced to request international aid, even though...
A recent survey on working parents around the globe says they spend just half an hour a day with their children. Though this sounds shocking, whats the solution to the work vs stay-at-home debate? There are no easy answers, especially for...
: Barack Obama, the first postracial candidate, is heading to the Democratic nomination because of his near-universal support from black voters... The idea that Obama was a postracial politician dates to his famous keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004....
: ? The editorial, Smile please, rightly emphasised better relations between big political parties and argued that had the Congress and the BJP got along with each other, a lot could have been achieved. The fact remains that the Congress...
Recently an India-China meeting of water resources officials concluded with the usual: promises to share time series data on river flows in the Himalayas. While they grapple with this simple transaction, the problem has magnified in the last few years. Because...
Recently, the UKs Guardian newspaper published a shot of what looked like a golf bag containing a pair of clubs. These were in fact the shrivelled, twisted legs of 14-year-old Adil, one of hundreds of children born malformed or brain-damaged to...
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejads Indian visit and the gas pipeline have prompted comment in almost all newspapers. Delhi-based Hindustan Express, in an editorial on April 29 said, Ahmadinejads visit is a historic one in that his initiative has succeeded in making...