You are reading this on the concluding day of the Winter Session of Parliament. Thoughts on the 21-day session. Five proper nouns dominated: Common nouns like price rise, inflation, federalism, and unemployment were expected to dominate the debates in this session. But instead, only these proper nouns made headlines for all the right/wrong reasons: George Soros, Gautam… Continue reading In Parliament this winter
When Parliament was reconstituted after the 2024 Lok Sabha election, your columnist had drawn up a list of eight laws that should be considered by the Union government and repealed to ensure justice, equality, liberty for all citizens. Now, with the Winter Session of Parliament halfway through, let us add four more items to that… Continue reading A list of laws that need to be repealed
We are into the second week of the Winter Session of Parliament. The first week was washed out. MPs from Opposition parties, like the Trinamool Congress and the Samajwadi Party, are demanding ‘issues of national public importance’ be discussed on the floor of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha: price rise, unemployment, the situation in the… Continue reading Parliament Session: BJP Don’t Want To Answer Some Hard Questions
This column is not about the IPL, or fat cat pay cheques, or sons of politicians heading cricket bodies, or India being walloped by the Black Caps in a home series. Once a cricket buff, I have switched off the sport in the last few years. A colleague reminded me that the five Test match… Continue reading Indian cricket commentary on radio needn’t be mediocre
We need to finalise the subject for this week’s column. Any ideas? The winter session of Parliament is still more than a fortnight away, so the piece we planned on pre-legislative consultation of bills is not entirely topical. Hold for now. Do one on Indo-Canada ties? Any issue on public policy which will make for… Continue reading On rediscovering an old love and learning to enjoy the journey
Eight thousand miles away, across an ocean, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have desperately tried to woo youth and women before election day. Also in November, in the country of Kamala Devi Harris’s maternal ancestors, political parties are reaching out to 6 crore women voters and 2.5 crore youth in Maharashtra and Jharkhand. Raise your… Continue reading Big Poll Promises From Maharashtra To Michigan – But Where Are The Jobs?
Days to go for the most high-profile election in the universe. As the two candidates enter the final lap of campaigning, the messaging has decidedly gone off-colour. The Kamala Harris campaign recently ran a commercial on Snapchat and Instagram, scripted around the love life of black voters. In the commercial, depicting a speed dating scenario,… Continue reading Trump To Bolsonaro To Many More, The Death Of Decency In Politics
135 down to 55! The average number of days Parliament sits annually has gone down from 135 days in the first Lok Sabha to 55 days in the 17th Lok Sabha (2019-24). So what happens during the remaining 300 days? Standing Committees, which consider and report on Demand for Grants, Bills, annual reports, and discuss… Continue reading When Parliament isn’t in session, standing committees are where the action is
Happy birthday Mr Amitabh Bachchan. Today, on his 82nd birthday, here are fifteen nuggets about the greatest Indian now on the planet. One: His first job was as an executive at Bird and Company in Kolkata for a monthly salary of Rs 500. During his time in the city, he acted in a few English plays… Continue reading Happy birthday, Mr Amitabh Bachchan: What you may not know about India’s biggest star
This fortnight’s column is on a subject that will never make the 9 o’clock news: Malnourishment. In 2012, Gujarat was grappling with one of the highest numbers of underweight children in the country. When asked about this alarming statistic in an interview to the Wall Street Journal, then Chief Minister Narendra Modi had a bizarre… Continue reading When Will Centre Understand That India’s Malnutrition Problem Is Real?
