Passionate About India

As I remained hooked on to Times Now (which, by far, gave the best coverage possible and reminded me of CNN’s Iraq war coverage way back in 1991), and without sleeping for a moment for the first twelve hours, saw the mockery of our democracy, I really felt sad for our brave policemen who gave up their lives – just like the many innocent people who also paid the price – for a non-committed, spineless, political class ruling this great country. Every time a political leader spoke, it was a feeling of shame that I felt somewhere deep within, and couldn’t help but wonder when we would see the end of this rotten, old and decaying lot who can sell this country to the dogs for a few hundred crores. It was indeed sad to see the nation pay the price for their uncommitted, visionless leadership. Haven’t we had enough of disgusting and shameless statements like ‘we are planning to modernize our equipments and increase budgets for our intelligence departments...’ etc? Forget having any kind of mor...

I needn’t tell our readers how proud we are at Planman Media about our magazines. All of you who have followed my editorial pieces would almost think that we are too arrogant and have a high degree of superiority complex... But I want to confess. While we are very proud that there’s hardly any media house in the country that is capable of giving a more intellectual and incisive analysis of committed news that matters to the country, there is one media house which has too often beaten us with their analysis. And yes, that’s the TOI group. Too often, when we have thought we have an original idea and plan to put it on our cover, we’ve seen, the very next day, the same in the front page of The Times of India - the most recent one being our Aazamgarh story. What was amazing was not that they covered it – everyone covered it – but that the kind of first hand statistics they had in their story showed that that it was not journalism for the heck of it... It was intellectual journalism with com...

Many of the readers, especially those away from Delhi, might wonder what is the BRT in the first place? Well... BRT stands for Bus Rapid Transport system. It’s an effort by the Delhi government to have a separate bus transport corridor in Delhi. So what it has essentially done is that a divider has been constructed in between certain existing roads, wherein half or one third of that road has been reserved only for bus movement. Subsequently, at some places the roads have been widened a little; and at others, the roads have been simply divided into two undemarcated lanes. What has actually irritated the Delhi rich (because they are the ones driving cars – since Tata’s Nano is not yet on the roads) is that now they have less of wide roads to manipulate their cars in. Of course, there is a point here. Delhi was known for its freewheeling wide roads, and suddenly, narrower roads for cars do look irritating. Thus, but obviously, the BRT has come under heavy criticism with a lot of people ev...

Ownership through paper (shares) has always been and will always remain the biggest illusion of ownership. Real ownership comes through sweat and hard work and never diminishes in value!!! As I sit down to write this editorial, the selling pressure in the markets have been so intense today that the Sensex broke the 8,000-mark and slumped to a low of 7,697 – down a whopping 63.7% (13,510 points) from its all-time peak of 21,207, touched on January 10 this year. I remember having written the last time on the same subject for the 3rd February, 2008 issue, when the markets had fallen to around 15,000 in an edit titled, “If you can, invest to become an entrepreneur instead of investing in stock markets!!!” As the index falls to almost half of what it was then, there is nothing more important that I feel like sharing again with my readers. Readers of TSI know that over the last few months, I’ve constantly been focussing on the impending global crisis, the subprime crisis and the failure of t...

November 4, 2008… In all probability, we shall not see another day of more global historical relevance in our lifetimes! While I had hoped that Barack Obama should win the American Presidential polls (you all would know how less of love I have for George Bush and his party representatives), yet, I didn’t really believe six months back that it would be him standing as the President-elect of America today. That the majority in America could vote for a black, half-Muslim, with madrasaa education (in Indonesia, where he lived with his second Muslim father) – whatever his credentials were – was something I felt was quite tough a call. But the tough has happened today! Barack Obama might not be historically a great leader, but he has created history under his leadership. He may not have been a great revolutionary or may not have been identified with any cause-centred leadership – like Martin Luther King Jr had been – but he showed that having got the chance of being the right man at the righ...

Indian Space Research Organisation’s Chandrayaan-1 has sculpted history by making India only the sixth nation in the history of mankind to send an unmanned mission to the moon. No doubt, this feat is commendable for India not just because the launch follows immediately after India has positioned itself as a de-facto nuclear power (post signing of the Indo-US Nuclear deal), but it also follows immediately after a Chinese taikonaut (astronaut) set his foot in space. Moreover, as per reports, this successful launch would not only help India to look out for Helium 3 (an integral source for nuclear energy), but also can create a possible revenue stream in the future. But above all, the biggest achievement is that India could successfully attain all this at a relatively lesser cost than that of China (that is, if media reports are to be believed). Although there are umpteen reasons to celebrate this remarkable technological feat, what has followed immediately after the successful launch was ...