BY URI AVNERI It has always been a secret ambition of mine to have a bagatz ruling bearing my name. Bagatz is the Hebrew acronym for “High Court of Justice”, the Israeli equivalent of a constitutional court. It plays a very important role in Israeli public life. Having a ground-breaking Supreme Court decision named after you confers a […]
BY SYED MUHAMMAD ALI It doesn’t take a poverty specialist to realise that the world in the 21st century remains plagued by disturbing disparities. Some basic statistical comparisons do, however, help illustrate this point. Consider, for instance, the fact that the richest 85 people on the globe now control as much wealth as the poorest […]
BY JOHN SPRITZLER Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Constitutional scholar (like President Obama once was), is leading a march against corruption, by which he means the inordinate influence of Big Money on Congress. In an interview to Bill Moyers, Lessig says: “The solution is to change the way we fund elections by supporting small dollar-funded elections […]
BY VASUNDHARA SIRNATE In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, the main protagonist, Guy Montag, is a “fireman” whose task is to burn all books. Set in a fictional town in the American Mid-West, Fahrenheit 451 is about a society where “firemen” hunt people who hide books, raze their houses and burn all literature. Out of curiosity, one […]
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 […]