Passionate About India

To set a new global order which entails a green and peaceful earth, a Hillary Clinton and an Al Gore combination is no more a matter of choice, but an imperative! The choice of Al Gore as this year’s recipient of Nobel peace prize is a pleasant relief for all those who have otherwise given up all hopes about the cause of a greener and better world. In fact, from the very beginning, Al Gore’s contribution and his continuous efforts on environmental issues have posed a striking contrast to the another man who eventually became the President of United States in 2000. From the year 2000 onwards, while Gore and his Intergovernmental Committee on Climatic Change strived hard to caution the world about the ensuing dangers of global warming, George Bush and his coterie have been doing everything possible to make the Kyoto Protocol a non-starter. One just wonders what would have happened if the United States’ Supreme Court verdict of the year 2000 Presidential elections had essentially gone in ...

Immediately after Rahul Gandhi was appointed as the General Secretary of the AICC, he – along with a dozen other appointees – demanded to the Honourable Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh that the ‘iconic’ National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) be extended to the entire nation. This is a quantum jump considering that the scheme encompasses only 330 districts currently. Well, how much of this calibrated action would eventually help the Congress Party in the forthcoming elections is a matter of debate, but the bigger contention is the scheme in itself, which – though brilliant in theory – in practice, has failed to deliver as tangible benefits for the poorer masses of the country in its current form. The NREGA has been drawing flak for long. And surprisingly, the criticism of this scheme has not just been coming from liberal economists and market analysts alone, for whom the fiscal health of the government is more important than anything else. In fact, the more vociferous protest...

The last week of September couldn’t have been better for India. While on the one hand, a young team, coming out fresh from the shadows of the seniors, went to an experimental championship – primarily as underdogs – and eventually came out as victors, the same week also saw Congress eventually coming out of its inhibitions and getting ready to hand over the mantle to a whole new generation of young men. Although the Congress had been deliberating on the move for long, it was only now that it got the gumption to go ahead to appoint Rahul Gandhi as the General Secretary of All India Congress Committee (AICC). Till now, Rahul Gandhi had not been leading from the front and was more active at the backend. But then, eventually, he had to accept this reality that without him at the helm of affairs, the Congress does not have a future. More so at a point in time where there is mounting speculation of an early election on account of the Left allies falling apart on the Indo-US Nuclear deal. To b...

The new version of cricket has so much to offer that even the one day version of the game is going to lose its sheen in due course. And the five day version? It’s history, already! What Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his men achieved at Johannesburg on 24th of September, 2007, has an interesting parallel with what Clive Lloyd and his men did way back in 1975. The West Indian team, under the leadership of Clive Lloyd, proved that it is not only possible to beat the whites in their own game, but to change the very version of the game for good. It was the West Indians who made the one day cricket a game of passion, aggression, ecstasy, dejection and probably every possible human emotion worth talking about. In fact, their historic win literally took the charm of the five day test matches away; and cricket, which was known as the gentleman’s game, became a game of adrenalin ever after! They continued their campaign for two consecutive world cups, becoming the toast of the world, giving the black...

Honourable minister for agriculture – sir, rather than cutting the subsidies from the midday mead scheme, please arrest the existing corruption in the public distribution system! A recent report carried by a leading daily stated the inability of the government to carry on with the subsidies provision of the food grains for the ‘midday meal scheme’. As such, since the very beginning, the scheme has been inflicted by myriad avoidable roadblocks, but what the government is now planning is going to be the final nail on the coffin of the scheme. According to the report, the agricultural Ministry is contemplating supplying food grains at the so called ‘economic rate’ (Rs. 12,000 per metric tonne), which is almost double the subsidised rate (Rs. 5650 per metric tonne), effectively meaning that it would neither be a loss nor a profit making proposition for the government. For a liberalised economy, which, at the behest of the prescription of the World Bank and IMF, is trying to cut subsidies, ...

Since the time of economic liberalisation, the Indian policy makers have been suffering a strange dilemma. As we all know, economic liberalisation was never a choice – so, if on one hand, policy makers have been unwillingly advocating the principles of free market, on the other, wherever they could, they willingly stuck to their age old legacy of control. Ergo, if the private sector enjoyed semi-liberal economic policies, public enterprises got completely stifled. In fact, the biggest loser of this policy hypocrisy has been none other than government run institutions and enterprises. They have suffered relentlessly on all fronts, but suffered the most on account of neglect of the most critical resource of any successful enterprise i.e. the human resource. My argument stems from the fact that in today’s world, the success and failure of any enterprise (particularly a business one) is in its people. And the manner in which this all-important resource has been treated in any governmental ...

What happened on 9/11 is something that the world would never forget. Memories of the twin towers coming down are impossible to erase but more than that what made this event even more ‘memorable’ is the manner in which the US government has gone around hunting for terrorists in Afghanistan, and followed it up with an engagement in Iraq, thus changing the future course of global geo-politics. Similarly, 7/7 would also remain a memorable day as that brings forth the memory of the gruesome London blasts; and more than that the way the UK police had gone about chasing the perpetrators of the crime, making the incident even more unforgettable, almost giving a new definition to terrorism. What the US did to Afghanistan and then to Iraq would always remain a matter of contention globally, and has left a lot of room for criticism, but then the way the Indian government has been sleeping on terrorism over the past so many years, and allowing innocent citizens to be killed, is probably worse tha...