November 2010
LESSONS FROM PATALIPUTRA
In the late 1990s, when Nitish Kumar was still seen as having more influence in Delhi than in Patna, there was a golden rule about Bihar that every rookie political journalist had to learn by heart. This was the M-Y or Muslim-Yadav combination, that we were taught was impregnable. Add Dalits and Lalu would always […..]
NEEDED: A RAKHI SAWANT LAW
Manmohan Singh is too occupied with the telecom scandal at the moment to worry about the shenanigans of Rakhi Sawant and company but perhaps he should, once the current logjam over the telecom licenses is resolved. It sounds flippant perhaps but bear with me a moment The Rakhi Sawant show on Imagine is now officially […..]
G20 OR G-NOWHERE?
Other countries host the G20 as a closed-door confabulation of leaders, wrapped up in a cocoon of water-tight security lest the usual legions of protesters outside spoil the party. South Korea has treated the latest Seoul meeting of the G20 as a coming-out party of sorts to showcase its own journey from poor East Asian […..]
MEMO TO BJP: RELAX ON OBAMA
The nineteenth century Prussian strategic thinker Carl von Clausewitz propounded an influential thesis on the dialectics of warfare writing that ‘˜war is politics by another means’. The BJP’s spokesperson Rajiv Pratap Rudy may or may not have read Clausewitz but his premature criticism of Obama for not mentioning the P-word at the Taj on Saturday […..]
STAIN ON THE OLIVE GREEN
The first thing every cadet passing through the hallowed portals of the National Defence Academy in Khadakvasla learns is its motto: ‘˜Service before self’. If the goings-on at Mumbai’s ironically mis-named Adarsh Society have even a kernel of truth in them, today’s cadets now know that at least some of their senior-most officers apparently couldn’t […..]
