Letter from the Editor
ONE of the lesser known areas of media responsibility is its relationship with the law. It is a relationship which is generally little understood, not…
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
DEMOCRACY sometimes teaches strange lessons, and the strangest of them all is currently being acted out in the remote North- eastern state of Assam. Since…
Book Review: My Years in an Indian Prison
So much is being written about political prisoners in India these days, that the layman might succumb to the temptation of focusing more on the…
ENOCH POWELL ‘Belfast May Seem an Enviable Place’
The Right Honorable Enoch Powell, PC, MBE, has been a major catalyst in racialist ferment for a long time now. Powell, who celebrated his sixty-fourth…
Letter from the Editor
THERE can be little more excitement for the media than to chronicle political events from inception to climax. Opportunities tend to be rare, but as…
Vietnam urges Bush to build on Clinton’s work
29 May 2001 Reuters News English (c) 2001 Reuters Limited HANOI, May 29 (Reuters) – Vietnam urged President George Bush on Tuesday to build on…
INTERVIEW-Pakistan says US policies polarise world
14 April 2003 Reuters News English (c) 2003 Reuters Limited ISLAMABAD, April 14 (Reuters) – Pakistan, a key U.S. ally in the war on terror,…
Interview with Ellen Kullman
DuPont Chair & CEO ELLEN KULLMAN in conversation with CHAITANYA KALBAG. Edited excerpts: Do you think the India-US CEO Forum you are a member of…
Last Word- Ear to the Ground
This mid-December afternoon, the Ear detects the rumble of Old Man 76 gasping through his last lap, and the first stirrings of Childe 77. Here…
READING THE BAR CODES
“UPON MY WORD: India’s prisons are stuck in a time warp” STRANGE HOW time’s machine travels back and forth at warp speed. Two hundred and…
Losing Voice
English with an American accent, there were jokes about being the “51st US state”, the US military had a huge presence, and the economy was…
The Rainmaker
The Mac II, launched on March 2. 1987, cost $5.500 and was the first computer with a colour graphical interface. Three years earlier Apple had…
Wanted- A Big Bang Budget
These are extraordinary times and we witness extraordinary phenomena. Three weeks before the Union Budget, when finance ministers customarily crawl under their carapaces, the honourable…
India’s Best B School
Although commerce is older even than the thirty pieces of silver that persuaded Judas Iscariot to betray Jesus Christ, it took humans a long time…
Two to Tango
An early breakfast is something that most journalists don’t care for. Most of my tribe skip it and among those who don’t, very few sip…
Breakout Companies
Raghuram Govind Rajan is a lucky man. Two weeks into his new job as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India his friend Ben Bernanke,…
India’s Best CEOs
We are waiting to exhale. Food prices fell in the last fortnight of December, for the first time in six years, and headline inflation is…
Going for Gold
Seven and a half minutes into the movie Paan Singh Tomar a journalist asks the eponymous hero, played by Irrfan Khan, why he became a…
Pulling Punches
Why did god create stock-market analysts? To make weather forecasters look good, runs the rather puerile joke. But seriously, company analysis is an earnest business-in…
Buy Me, Buy Me Not
Stock markets and their behavior are an inexact science. Technical analysts will study head and shoulders patterns, Fibonacci retracements, stochastic oscillators and sundry chicken entrails…
The Best Companies To Work For
Know one’s onions” means to know one’s subject well. But do we really know why our economy fares as it does, how supply and demand…
Gender Gag
Sexual harassment can be crude and overt or very subtle, but you know you are being sexually harassed when you experience it. Those around you…
India’s Most Valuable Companies
Nothing matches the rush of blood to the brain when you read super-sized success stories. Nothing tells the story of the Milky Way of densely-packed…
India’s Best B-School
Professional suitable match for beautiful, slim MBA Punjabi girl… Boy to be MBA, Engineer, CA.” Not too long ago, in the matrimonial ads crowding our…
THE SCINDIAS-The Battle Royal
It Began as a small tiff, as all battles do. The two antagonists identities lent it a delicious irony: Vijaya Raje Scindia, the ex-Rajmata of…
SCHOLARSHIPS-POLITICAL COMPULSIONS
Two experts on Soviet studies, both lecturers in major universities, were in formed late last month by the University Grants Commission (UGC) that their applications…
THE SCINDIAS-THE BATTLE ROYAL
It Began as a small tiff, as all battles do. The two antagonists’ identities lent it a delicious irony: Vijaya Raje Scindia, the ex-Rajmata of…
REAPING THE WHIRLWIND
Hiteswar Saikia was last Fortnight trying to settle into the hottest seat in India-the chief ministers hip of Assam. The diminutive, balding ‘politician had been…
Signs Of The Times
There was the baby-faced ex-pilot, all thumbs as he handled the controls in his political flight simulator; the rough-spun son of the, soil, a man…
The Burning Of Assam
The fuse has been burning for almost four years and the mood in the state has passed through all the faces of anger, despair and…
A State Ravaged
It was beyond the ken of a civilised society, a blood spattered vindication of a heartless government’s sudden constitutional piety. The carnage began with a…
FRIEND IN NEED
The Rashtriya Swyamsewak Sangh (Rss) is everybody’s favourite bugbear. So perhaps it was inevitable that it would be accused of having a hand in the…
A BATTLE SUPREME
Titled Judiciary: At tacks and Survival, the speech had been long in coming, the speaker delayed, first by an attack of diabetes in March and…
CLEARED BY THE COURT
The majority of Justices Islam and Mishra agreed with Solicitor-General Parasaran that Thakur nursed a grudge against Jagannath Mishra. “Remand for tri I will a…
MYSTERIOUS U-TURN
Although it is a blasphemous thought, it has cropped up in many a legal mind during the last few weeks: if bets were placed on…
POLITICAL COMPLUSIONS
Two experts on Soviet studies, both lecturers in major universities, were informed late last month by the University Grants Commission (UGC) that their applications for…
PRISONERS- FIGHTING FOR A CAUSE
The salaried middle classes have time and again fallen prey to the Government’s more capricious economic decisions. But, one group that has suffered the most…
JAGANNATH MISHRA-CLEARED BY THE COURT
HE INDIA-RUBBER man, Jagannath Mishra, had done it again. For months, the Bihar chief minister’s political fate had hung in the balance while the Supreme…
CHEATING THE HANGMAN
Convicted killers Billa and Ranga were expected to make headlines last fortnight. Make news, they certainly did, but not the way everybody anticipated. Instead of…
ENDS OF JUSTICE
Gauhati and Jorhat and small batches people took out processions in protest against the decision to hold the elections. Even political parties opposed to the…
Suppressing Dissent?
EVERY dissenter is in a minority of one, and K. Ashok Rao, 36, deputy manager in Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), is discovering what it…
HANGING FIRE
The Quality of justice seemed to be under tremendous strain last fortnight. At issue was the vexatious question of capital punishment. As usual, the shock…
The Enemy Within
Iran’s much-vaunted Islamic revolution appears to have finally spilled over into India. Chanting Allah-o- Akbar and wielding primitive weapons like lathis bristling with nails, bicycle…
AN HEIR SPLITTING LEGACY
The story is as complicated as the whorls on a fingerprint, a ready-made screen-play bursting with grandeur, feudalism, pretension, and the tattered remnants of pomp…
SNAG IN THE ROPE
Anticlimax has become the boon companion of the Supreme Court. When the court reopened on July 18 after its summer vacation, it was shadowed by…
“WASHINGTON IS STARTING TO LOOK LIKE DELHI”
An erudite scholar, acclaimed author and the William Ziegler Professor of Business administration at the Harvard Business School, British historian Niall Ferguson wears several hats.…
“ India a $10 Billion Market In five Years “
On the US economy Things are getting better in the United States. It’s a slow recovery and some of that is based on how steep…
Lean on Me
The US economy needs India more than ever, says Chaitanya Kalbag Barack Obama had barely walked out of Parliament’s Central Hall when the debate began…
CLEANING UP OUR ACT( India is trying to do its bit on climate change )
At the Hamburg group of 20 summit on 7-8July, diplomats toiled through most of the night over US intransigence on climate change before they agreed…
DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARNESS
The Washington post adopted this four-word slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” in February 2017, its first in 140 years. It was used by its owner…
Identify Yourself
The Fates Of the four million people whose names did not appear in the ‘complete draft’ of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam…
RED-LETTER DAYS
This is a year of anniversaries , some unpleasant, some prescient, some momentous. CE 2019 is important not only because of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s…