Come Budget ‘06, it will be sixteen years on the trot for reforms and liberalisation, often referred to as Manmohanomics. The man who engineered this economic coup of sorts and pulled India out of its self-imposed socialist shackles is now the PM.
Browsing: POINTBLANK
Hamlet’s hesitation is legion, but he was a shade lucky. The Danish prince of Shakespearean lore at least had a choice, though a difficult one. Does the moderate man, longing for a simple, safe and secure middle path on various issues, macro or micro, confronting him day after day have any hope in these troubled times?
The material, and pre-dominantly Christian,West is not known for reverence. And tolerance is not a virtue of the Islamic Middle-East. Given such genetic proclivities, the ongoing imbroglio over the caricaturing of the Islamic prophet by European publications is neither a collision of cultures nor a clash of civilisations; these are lofty tags.
The north thrives even as the south wanes (Vadakku vazhgirathu, therkku theikirathu). This slogan used to stir scores of southerners in TN, in the fifties and early sixties. Those were heady times when the India beyond the Vindhyas was forbidden land of ‘Madarasis’ for the ‘northerners’.
I shall begin without a preamble because the events of the present are self-evident. Of course, these days you often claim to be unaware of even obvious things, that either you were misled or no one told you. But even schoolboys have stopped putting up such excuses. A PM can certainly do better than that.
In India, it pays to be a foreigner. Doubters can check with Quattrocchi on that. Now, who’s this Quattrocchi? Well, one can check with Sonia, pardon, Soniaji, on that. Of course, there is no guarantee of a response, because her voice appears to have been frozen on this issue, unlike the defreezed money of her Italian compatriot and close family friend.
Tapping of telephone lines of important persons is probably as old as the invention of the telephone itself. And the practice of intercepting messages or other private communications must be as old as humanity itself. From messengers on horseback to pigeons
On 31 Dec, 2005, TN elections seemed like a distant affair. But just a week into 2006 and the political air is suddenly thick with poll talk.
A trip down the memory lanes and by-lanes of TN politics would confound the sanest of individuals.
2005 began with the receding waters of the tsunami and is set to end to the accompaniment of flood waters left behind by copious rainfall. To be sure, the lingering memories and images of 2005 shall be that of water everywhere, all around and from up and below.