The videos and images despatched by Cho Seung-Hui, who killed 32 persons in Virginia Tech in US before turning the gun on his own head, to a TV channel offer vivid insights into his maniacal moorings and morbid mindset. Childhood grievances, medical depression, social isolation and paranoia had joined hands with misplaced religious moralism to create a lethal personality.
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Friends of Nehru dynasty, Romans and Congressmen would like to believe that Sonia’s foreign origin is a non-issue. The intellectual and liberal elite and the honourable mediamen in print and on primetime would debate endlessly the pros and cons of a foreign coach for the Indian cricket team, but would care less about being ruled, in person or by proxy, by a foreign-born foreigner.
For someone with a congeni-tal aversion to science since schooldays, I have always preferred the escapist and doubtless, simplistic, definitions of Murphy’s law: ‘If it wriggles, it is biology, if it stinks it is chemisty and if it does not work, it is physics’.
Welcome to the centenary celebrations of State-sponsored communal politics. It was in 1906 that the Morely-Minto Reforms injected into the Indian polity the poison of separate electorates and reservation of seats for Muslims, which eventually led to the partition of the country in 1947.
It was time someone pricked the social justice hot air balloon floated by the cynical ‘weepy’ Singh as a bogey to distract the nation’s attention from his tottering regime. It did not help him to preserve his perch and power, for he fell in 11 months, but the demented act has paralysed the country ever after.
With politics, cricket and cinema occupying all of public mind space, Lord Rama, indeed, is an unlikely candidate for journalistic attention. The provocation to download that divine deity, who straddles all the worlds and beyond, into these columns are many.
India of the present seems to have rediscovered its past, at least in one respect. The Guptas and the Mauryas, the Cholas and the Chalukyas, the Pallavas or the Rajputs or such other vintage royal lineages have their modern mirror images, replete with kept kingdoms, fawning courtiers, unbridled power, private armies, palace intrigues and all such trappings
It is no surprise when politicos seek to hunt with their fellow political hounds. Little else could be expected of them in a milieu where principles are irrelevant and power at all cost is the goal. But it is when they attempt to run with the hares, the people, too, that the duplicity hurts.
‘Everywhere we have corruption. Nothing is free from corruption. Everybody wants to loot this country … The law does not permit us to do it, but otherwise we would prefer to hang people like you from the lamp post in public’: These were the observations of SC judge Katju while rejecting the bail plea of a Bihari government employee involved in the multi-crore fodder scam.