By Dr N. Janardhan A few weeks ago Sachin Tendulkar ‘controversially’ became the youngest and first sportsperson to be formally decorated with India’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna. Since 1954, the official criterion for conferring this coveted award was the “highest degree of national service”, which included artistic, literary, and scientific achievements, as well […]
Manoj Mitta’s analysis exposes a regulated drift in the Gujarat investigation, which the Indian media has studiedly chosen to ignore, even when put down in hard print BY AJAZ ASHRAF Once you complete reading Manoj Mitta’s breathtaking investigative book, The Fiction of Fact-Finding; Modi & Godhra, you are likely to wonder about the priorities of […]
BY UZMA KHAN Animal societies are free, with no nationalities; they just belong to our very own planet Earth, while human society is limited by geographical boundaries. Though it may sound obvious, but recently, when a leopard was caught at Pasrur near Sialkot, it made headlines as an ‘Indian Leopard’ which was caught and put […]
BY JAWED NAQVI Strangely enough, a TV channel screened the 1960s Indian movie Leader the other day, which was a day after Arvind Kejriwal filed an unusually bold FIR against India’s most powerful tycoon Mukesh Ambani and his alleged accomplices in the ruling party. The evicted Delhi chief minister claimed high-level collusion to arbitrarily jack up the […]
BY PRAFUL BIDWAI ‘India makes a power point’, triumphantly announced a Times of India headline when Hyderabad-born Satya Nadella was named the CEO of the software giant Microsoft, evoking its well-known ‘Power Point’ programme. ‘India on the move!’ exulted other major papers. This euphoria replicated the sentiment that another caption conveyed some years ago: ‘India, beauty superpower […]
BY AJAZ ASHRAF Once you complete reading Manoj Mitta’s breathtaking investigative book, The Fiction of Fact-Finding; Modi & Godhra, you are likely to wonder about the priorities of the Indian media, which never shies away from trumpeting its contributions to our vibrant democracy. It’s possible you’d ask why the charges of an elaborate cover-up that Mitta […]
BY VIJAY PRASHAD Geneva 2’s mood mirrored the sound of mortar and despair on the ground in Syria. Not much of substance came of the former, as the U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi tiredly indicated that diplomacy continued despite the lack of a breakthrough. He hoped that the United States and the Russians would pressure […]
BY JANET SURMAN Gross pay, to a certain extent, appeases workers because they perceive themselves to be earning more than they are, although they also generally believe they are being robbed on a regular basis, seeing a considerable amount clawed back from what they maintain they have rightfully earned. Some of what is transferred from […]
BY ROBERT FISK In Iran, there should be a Dead Poets Society. Or perhaps a Martyred Poets Society, with its newest member a certain Arab-Iranian from Ahwaz, in the far south-west of the country, on the Iraqi border. He has been hanged for “spreading corruption on earth”, one of hundreds put to death by the […]
BY HUSSAIN NADIM “The Empire, long divided, must unite: long united, must divide.” The classical quote from the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong captures the dynastic cycle: the fall of Han Dynasty, the partition of the empire into three kingdoms, and the eventual reunification of the empire under the Jin dynasty. If anything […]