I AND MY WORDS

The hoopla that Mamata Bannerjee and her coterie has created today over the Railway Budget 2012 is clearly targeted towards her West Bengal audience. The kind of drama and sulking happening now clearly points to one of the three points: Mamata is cornering UPA-II to concede a package for West Bengal of about INR 8000 crores that she has been demanding for the past one year, else she continues to embarrass the government. This shall be used as an excuse to pull out of the UPA-II so as to save her vote share from eroding by continued alliance with the Congress There is a possibility of formation of the imaginary third front as is being projected by media moguls and so called rooters of a non Congress non BJP 'secular' alternative. So much drama for nothing. This is ridiculous. One cannot continue to blackmail the government at the cost of destabilizing the country. For once I stand by the current government. Why do the employees of Indian Railways do not seem to be the aam aa

There has been a lot of discussion in the Indian media and political circles. It all started with the convergence of a few state leaders Like Naveen Patnaik and Mamata Bannerjee against the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC). Tongues have been set wagging with the invites sent out by Shiromani Akali Dal's swearing in ceremony. By sending out invites to Mamata, Jayalalitha and many others (read here ), Sukhbir Singh Badal has set the cat amongst the pundit and political circles, with the talk of the revival of a United Front like formation all over again dominating headlines. Within all this euphoria, people tend to forget a few basic facts which need to be cleared up. First of all, let us look at the potential Third Front. There is no way that a Third Front can come together, as a lot of parties that are imaginary constituents of the same are bitter political rivals to each other in the respective states. A classic case is the Trinamool Congress and CPI(M), who are mortal en

Today the Delhi based newspaper Hindustan Times reported the news that Nobel laureate Har Gobind Khurana, the man who decoded the RNA sequence, died on Wednesday at the age of 86. His story is little known to today's Indians, and perhaps life prior to the Nobel Prize is forgotten in India. I am raking up a dead man's past because I want to point out  certain things that happened in his life that continue to happen even today, and we should stop and think for a moment what we have 'achieved'. Har Gobind Khurana's story was like any successful Indian emigrant's story with the typically filmy twist. Very few people would know the fact that he had applied for the post of lecturer with both the Delhi University and Punjab University, Jalandhar. As every successful emigrant's story goes, his application was rejected just because he did not have any political affiliation. My point is that the reason we today suffer intellectual bankruptcy in India even today has

It has been some time now that we have had high inflation rates, and this has been pushed to the extent that for the first time in India we have a situation where housing loans now would perhaps pass on to the children of the lenders post their retirement because of ballooning interest rates spiraling out of control. It does not surprise anyone that this situation of super inflation (as I would call it) does not come under control. There are multiple reasons behind it. I shall talk about a couple of them, and hope others pick the signals up as well. Food prices have gone up across the world. Continuous monitoring by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) has shown that prices have risen five times since 2007, when food was treated as a commodity and future trading was allowed with the blessing of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and big agricultural giants like Cargill, Dow and Monsanto. This has already created havoc across the world which frighteningly led to food riots in

It has taken a while to come out, but the 2G spectrum scam has just cast a wider net. Puzzled as the four of us who read this blog may be about what has Paryavaran Bhavan, the office of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) got to do with the 2G spectrum scandal, the truth is far deeper than most of us, including even those fighting cases for getting top ministers investigated (pointed reference Subramanian Swamy) have perhaps imagined. The whole scam actually started with Mr. Andimuthu Raja becoming Minister of Environment in 2004. The period between 2004-2007 should be marked as one of the darkest chapters in the history of environmental governance in India. A lot of companies got clearances in ways that could make Somalia look like it adheres to law and order. Cronyism was at its peak. Clearances, officers, project reports - name any item, and it was bought and sold. Most of the controversial mining that has since been brought to the public notice obtained clearances duri