Passionate About India

On the 2nd of October last year, when we launched The Sunday Indian with five editions in English, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Gujarati, we had thought that this was the best we could have pulled off and that we shouldn’t think of anything more, at least for the next two to three years! Within 6 months of the launch of Business & Economy – our first media venture – we launched 4Ps Business and Marketing; and within a year of that, we offered The Sunday Indian; and recently, the Indian PC Magazine. After five language editions of The Sunday Indian, we had to look beyond. So here we are today, launching 8 additional editions of The Sunday Indian in Urdu, Malayalam, Telugu, Assamese, Marathi, Kannad, Oriya and Punjabi, along with this special issue on the hundred most controversial Indians of the last hundred years! That makes it 13 editions in all... by far the highest number of editions for any news weekly in the country (the next highest is 6 editions of the leading news weekly of In...

At our institute, The Indian Institute of Planning & Management (IIPM), we teach that education at all levels has to necessarily translate into economic wellbeing, which then translates into economic growth, which has to further translate into pan-national economic development. If it does not, then there is something severely wrong with the said education system. Similarly, we also teach that economic growth has to necessarily translate into national wellbeing, and if it fails to, then there is something structurally wrong with the way the economy is organised. Invariably, in the classes that we conduct at IIPM, one name that surfaces as a classic metaphor for poor economic organisation is – India! Post liberalisation, barring initial hiccups, the Indian economy had been consistently sustaining annual growth rates above 5%. But unfortunately, this growth could just touch upon a very minuscule percentage of the Indian population, while the majority of the population remained complet...

The obsession of Indian parents with high marks and high percentage in boards is legendary. More legendary is their obsession with their progenies joining IIT, taking science streams and doing engineering. I remember that after I cleared my tenth boards, I had thought that that was the time to watch good movies and play cricket. One morning, with much enthusiasm in my mind, I went to call out one of my friends, only to unbelievably find him taking tuitions! Perplexed, upon enquiring, I found out that his IIT preparations had already started. I actually asked him that evening why he wanted to go to IIT. His standard reply was, “Because my Papa wants me to!” Upon enquiring further, I realised his ‘Papa’ wanted him to go to IIT because their neighbour’s son was also in IIT. Thankfully, my dad during my entire schooling never put any such pressures on me. The only thing he wanted me to do was to get decent marks in Maths and English in school, and read as much literature as possible. In fa...

Camelot was not a word I understood as a teenager in 1984. My life revolved around fond ambitions and dreams about India and about my father’s constant exhortation about fighting poverty. Most of our discussions at the dinner table revolved around exasperated talk about licences, government permits and assorted regulations. I was, like millions of Indians like me, bewildered by the malignant forces that eventually led to Operation Blue Star and the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her bodyguards. Like many Indians, I sometimes fell prey to cynical judgments about the future of India. I should not have done so. Rajiv Gandhi became the Prime Minister and won a mandate that was even more massive than what his grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru had ever got. For people like me, Rajiv Gandhi was a tornado that would sweep the outdated politics out of India. He was the man who would finally do what Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru had promised to do. He represented the new India, the India that wanted to...

Mayawati’s sweeping victory in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections was a vindication of the fact that all is not yet lost of the cause of India. The nation’s largest and perhaps one of the worst ruled state is finally out of the clutches of mafia rule and is probably heading towards a new dawn of equitable social and economic development. Mayawati’s victory is not only significant that a Dalit woman has once again been given the mantle of the largest state, but is also the reflection of the changing dynamics of India’s socio-political milieu. Her sweeping victory is one of the biggest of Indian democracy, by all parameters. Probably for the first time in the history of modern India, people cut across caste lines and came together to vote for a woman who is known to be a hard task master and accepts no nonsense. Two years ago, when the people of Bihar dethroned Lalu Prasad and rejected his caste-based divisive politics and reinstated Nitish Kumar, they had shown the path. Despite this,...

After celebrating the execution of Saddam and (almost) writing the obituary of Fidel Castro, the US was sitting pretty and eying an opportunity to engage with Iran. But, the hale and hearty revival of Castro and his iconoclastic interview, blasting Bush for freeing a terrorist and his biofuel plans, terming the latter as a genocide, had put sudden halt to the celebrations. Moreover, much to their chagrin, what they have witnessed over the last couple of weeks are some historic decisions that were taken up by a few countries, which could well mark the end of their hegemony and the beginning of the new world order. To begin with, lets start with the most historic and yet carefully ignored news of this week. On 1 May 2007, the Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, severed ties with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, after clearing debts in advance and pledged to start a new Banco del Sur. He stated that this new bank would disburse finances for state projects across Latin Ame...

You have sung the song and seen both the films and enjoyed the underlying spirit. It’s all about having a happy family and becoming good human beings, isn’t it? Yes, that’s what being Indian is all about. And I don’t want to corrupt the spirit of this issue by writing about the Iraq war or something! This issue takes me back to my childhood. Two brothers and a sister, a set of loving parents and two sets of grandparents! Wow! When I look back, I feel privileged. The variety of emotions we experienced as children growing up in a middle class family were just amazing. The times spent under my father’s family quilt (he had ordered an extra large quilt, so that on winter nights, we could all fit inside it and have a hell of a time having fun together, till it was time to go to bed). I remember my grandmother reading out poems and stories to us till we slept – and sowing the seeds of finer sensibilities early in life. I remember sleeping together with my brother, sharing our deepest secrets...