Passionate About India

As our PM Modi calls for strict action and immediate FIRs against Gau Raksha vigilantes, we need to think far beyond. Such acts won't vanish till we allow secularism to be mocked and in fact become fashionable through the use of words like "sickulars" to describe secular people. Our PM now needs to clearly and loudly state that not only would killing of human beings in the name of cow protection be treated with an iron hand but even any statement against our constitutional pledge to be a secular state won't be tolerated. Secularism should be the only religion of this nation till people become atheists – that is, till they give up their immature and illogical religions based on the false concept of existence of different varieties of man-made Gods.  In fact, leave alone religion and god, to me personally, it's a shame that in 2017, we still have a word called atheists. I mean, do we have a word for those who believe that the Earth is round? Do we have a word f...

Yogi Adityanath   as the   CM  of   UP  might have come as a rude shock to many. But it was always on the cards. Narendra Modi has been growing too big for RSS. And after becoming PM, he hadn’t once supported openly a single of the innumerable nonsense pelted out by RSS or its fringe groups. And make any analysis. Call the Congress anything, the Rahul-Akhilesh combine didn’t lose because Akhilesh was very bad and definitely not because of Rahul Gandhi. Akhilesh has been quite decent and speaks very well and keeping the memes aside Rahul Gandhi today speaks better than most of the BJP leaders who were campaigning in UP. He has worked hard on his communication.  In fact, the Congress won three of the five states irrespective of who formed the government. So, ‘Rahul Gandhi means no seats in states’, is a bogus theory and argument. What is happening the world over and in India right now is high voltage personality contests. Modi being the world-beating lead...

October 21, 1994. A phone call changed everybody’s life in our family forever. The call was to inform us that my brother – Aurobindo, then all of 19 years – had died in a road accident on the Gurgaon highway. A speeding bus hit the motorbike on which he was the pillion rider. Post his death, we set up the Aurobindo Chaudhuri Great Indian Dream Foundation, and have always had road safety concerns amongst our goals. So, I am most concerned about road safety especially on highways. No one, I am sure, can question that. Yet, I am against the recent ban on liquor shops on highways in India. I am actually against most moral bans. Bihar and Gujarat have put a ban on alcohol consumption. Controversies continue around it in Goa and Kerala and now the big blow has been the order to shut down liquor shops on all highways across India from April 1. Yet, just like we have a minimum age for getting married all over the world, minimum age for a driver’s licence and minimum age for voting, I believ...