Passionate About India

I am sure you all must be wondering what’s new or great about this – the entire world already is talking about it! Well, I promise I won’t write about Assange at all. Yet, I hope by the end of this article, you will realize what’s the big deal about this heading. After the overwhelming response to my previous to last editorial on media and lobbying, and combining it with my previous edit on democracy, I thought I should further my views – this time on media and democracy put together. When I had written elaborately on lobbying in my above mentioned editorial, I had only touched upon the perspective of the extent to which nations go to maintain their image. I had taken examples of how the History Channel, akin to slavish propagators of the capitalist dictate, distorted and promoted the image of the biggest global revolutionary icon, Che Guevara, as a global terrorist. I had also quoted how Michael Moore’s film Sicko was edited by an American channel and given a conclusion other than the...

Arindam Chaudhuri Analyses Why BJP should not and cannot afford to give up the demand for a JPC Probe Rs. 1,76,000 crores and counting! The scam is the biggest in the country ever – or rather, the sum total of all the other scams (that have been exposed) put together, multiplied by two and more! If not a joint parliamentary committee probe now, then when? A great democracy is one with a thriving opposition. After the last elections, I had raised a question. Is this the end of the road for the BJP for long? It looked so. BJP was stuck on its Hindutva mantra, while the Congress promised youth, which looked progressive and could connect with the masses better! After all, the Hindus themselves are so coexistential that they don’t like any communal stress in their lives. But then, complacency is the mother of all failures. And failure is the mother of all successes! Congress did two big blunders. Firstly, in a haste to promote Rahul Gandhi as its future leader – and in its fear that charism...

Last week I was very fortunate to be a part of this wonderful, moving and inspirational seminar on the ‘Power of One’ (coverage of the same is there after my editorial)! The speakers included Tarun Tejpal, who so very inspirationally spoke about the founding fathers of our nation, their vision and saga of sacrifices. Indeed, hearing Tarun speak is always a pleasure, just as much as seeing him – a real life hero of public interest journalism in India – always is! His words had the power of making me forget for a while that the same Nehru, whose birthday is ironically celebrated as Children’s Day in India, founded an India where today, seven times more kids suffer from malnutrition than they do in China – something Tarun himself quoted. He spoke of how we shouldn’t forget where India resides – in the villages. And the onus was on us to fight for the right cause. He spoke of things that at least we never forget at The Sunday Indian. There was Neelem Katara who spoke next in the most movin...

Arindam Chaudhuri argues why the Radia tapes prove nothing and why Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi remain two of India’s best journalists When Barack Obama was running for the US presidency, the common joke in America was that win or lose, Obama was sure to get a job with MSNBC! And when he won, the joke was that “all the channels declared Barack Obama as the US President at 11 in the night; MSNBC declared him the winner six months back.” That’s representative of how blatantly MSNBC had lobbied to make Obama the US President. And every media house with an ideology and conviction does so. Yes, that’s the job of media houses and of journalists with character, ideology and convictions. Wake up to reality, my friends! In UK and USA elections, newspapers rally behind individual parties till the very end – openly. And it’s not because the party owns the media house. During the very next elections, the media houses could support the opposition. That’s how it is in all true democracies where media...

In my editorials, I have vividly written on our Parliament and Parliamentarians. From suggesting that our Parliament be outsourced (after 26/11), to asking political parties to pave the way for educated youth, to criticising the way our Parliament works, to how our Parliamentarians put their personal priorities above the national ones, I have often written about them. Be that as it may, the recent deadlock in our Parliament that lasted over eight long days made me come up with a few more urgently required and practicable measures. These eight successive days of adjournment cost the exchequer a staggering Rs 63 crores! In this whole winter session of Parliament, except for a couple of days, neither of the houses functioned normally for even one single session. For the uninitiated, as per official figures cited in various media, the total budget for the two houses for 2010-11 is estimated to be around a whopping Rs 530 crore! For the first eight days of the Parliament in this season, on...

I am sure that after reading the heading, everyone must be restless to know how? But have some patience. It’s a story I repeat often. And I must repeat it again today. As a child, I remember having considerable friends in school. I am sure everyone has. But my friends’ circle from the very beginning had a specialty – it had only those people who were all very, very good in studies. If you are wondering how, the answer to that is in the place I used to stay, and still stay; a locality called Chittaranjan Park in New Delhi. This was originally that locality in Delhi where all those who had gotten displaced from Bangladesh during the partition were given a place to settle down. So, it used to be called the ‘EPDP colony’ i.e. East Pakistan Displaced Persons’ colony. This locality had its very special characteristics – maybe someday I will write about them all – including the one I referred to; i.e. it gave me, during my very early childhood, a group of friends who were all toppers! Being a...

Barack Obama came, he spoke and he conquered. At least that’s what some of the biggest media houses would have you believe. Nothing could be more misleading for the Indian public. Here are the reasons why the trip was only of feel-good value, that too for dumb people. 1. Obama had a clear cut mandate. And that mandate was to show Americans that he was taking back jobs for them. He took away business worth 10 billion dollars and 50,000 jobs. These 10 billion dollars could have been used in India to create 200 times more jobs, because for every American job we create in America, we can roughly create about 200 jobs in rural India. It was a classic game of begging that the new America is now seen playing in India and China. With India, it’s about access to its markets and deals with the government. And with China, it’s about the revaluation of the Chinese currency to reduce their foreign debt and make Chinese products uncompetitive in American markets! I would even say that it was indee...