Passionate About India

So what is wrong with India’s most guarded and hyped institutions of higher education, the IITs and the IIMs? Well, if you ask me, it’s difficult to find what is right! Apart from the acres of land at their disposal and the good PR machinery that they have (thanks to the half-educated and complex-ridden journalists infesting the print media, who are ready to write any illogical thing at their behest due to their lack of understanding on the issue)... Now, before anyone accuses me of competitive bitching, without wasting words, let me proceed systematically! The first question we must ask is what makes a great institution? The answer to that is actually very simple! Great course content and great faculty! Course content, however, is copyable and quite standardised – at least amongst the world’s finest institutions! Faculty, therefore, becomes the most important distinguishing factor. Different streams of education require different kinds of faculty expertise. Management education requir...

Why internet vandals and slander supporting entities like Google must be criminally prosecuted and made to pay for promoting defamatory links and suggestions, and how the new IT act is a step in the right direction and gives Indians the right to get justice against such vandalism. Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.” So wrote Daniel Lyons some years back, in a classic Forbes cover story titled 'Attack of the Blogs'. As the Senior Editor of Forbes then, Dan was simply expressing his extreme frustration at the utter nastiness of the Internet community, which seemed to have a super-majority of calumnious commentators, who thrived on the faceless protection that the net provided in order to leave shamefully slanderous and defamatory comments left, right and center. Cut to the present, and the situation has sickeningly worsened. Not just globally,...

Yes, it’s 20 years since Rajiv Gandhi’s death. And all my readers are very well aware that if there was one prime minister in my adult lifetime who ever made me feel proud as an Indian, it was him. I wish I could write this edit only on him, but I think many brilliant people, in Rajiv’s memory, have written on him in this issue; so my writing on him is of lesser importance – especially given the most likely fact that by the time this magazine reaches your hands, a huge and significant chapter in Indian politics would have come to an end. Yes, I am talking about the rule of CPM in Bengal. As far as all exit polls are concerned – except for some ludicrous CPM channel polls – it’s Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool party which is all set to sweep the polls in Bengal. In fact, if the leading channel is to be believed, then the current chief minister Budhdhadeb Bhattacharya is expected to lose too! So I think I can safely say it’s the end of CPM in Bengal. Or should I say the end of Stalinism in B...

Lest we forget, not very long back, Pervez Musharraf, former president of Pakistan told in an interview to CNN, “I think now, frankly, he [Osama bin Laden] Osama Bin Laden is dead for the reason he is a kidney patient. I don’t know if he has been getting all that treatment in Afghanistan now. And the photographs that have been shown of him on television show him extremely weak. I would give the first priority that he is dead and the second priority that he is alive somewhere in Afghanistan.” Cut to 2011, Osama bin Laden was hunted, and killed, not in any remote hideout in any tribal area of Pakistan but in Abbottabad, which is just a few kilometres away from the Pakistan Military Academy and merely 60 miles from Islamabad. So much so, the entire region is known to be a hotspot and boiling epicentre of terrorists, particularly al-Qaeda. This March, an Indonesian terrorist, Umar Patek, having links with al-Qaeda, was captured from this region. He was the one behind the Bali bombings and ...