So too a full-time PDS minister! Also a full-time co-operatives minister! Agriculture is becoming more and more hopeless and unviable. It is a great national shame that farmers and their families undergo in Vidharba. Readers, please go through the editorial, for details. As we write, there is another heart-breaking n new from Karnataka. A fairly…
West Bengal Government’s troubles, just the beginning?
There must be an explanation for the CPM cadre’s brutality! Self-conceit and arrogance? Stalinism’s legacy? Mao’s madness? Call it by any name. The Communists in West Bengal have exposed their limitations when it comes to economic development through conventional means. Police firing and the killings of the poor is the last thing they imagined. What…
Decline of Bharata Natyam?
The traditional Bharata Natyam faces an identity crisis? There is a perceptible decline in the traditional art of Bharata Natyam, as we have known for long. On the one hand, there is the prim and proper stiff upper lip of the Kalakshetra style. They have thoroughly discouraged individual talents to blossom. In so many words,…
Madras music season 2006-2007
Appreciating music and dance A middle class paranoia contributes to decline of Carnatic music? Music and dance, a country’s cultural symbols, always were thriving in India, even under difficult situations. There is always an appreciating elite and the crowd in any society, devoted to the maintaining of standards. Now, suddenly, it seems the music and…
Reforming the Indian National Congress Party
Can Karunakaran do what others have failed to do? Mr.K.Karunakaran,88,is an old Congress man of the vintage years.His best days were when he made himself an unapologetic courtier of the late Indira Gandhi when she rode to power.Later when she tried to consolidate her power by splitting the Congress party in 1969 and later when…
Sketch of the school founded by me in the village
This is the sketch by a Santiniketan artist who was working with me at the school I founded in my remote village in South India. This is the view of the original tiled roof along with the trees and the backdrop of western ghats. The school started in 1962 soon after I returned from Oxford….
Rural development cannot happen in isolation
Urban development and much of new infrastructure investments only can change rural India’s fortunes. Sam Pitroda, yes, this is the wizard, who befriended Rajiv Gandhi and helped to bring about the PC booths all over India. That was the first telephone revolution that reached almost the rural interiors also. It was later; now, the new…
TV channels have flashed the news breaks!
It is about the expected wheat short fall. NDTV flashed this news for a near half an hour in prime time news. Also the agriculture minister Sharad Pawar brave assertion as of now there is no cause for worry. Yet the minister in the same breath assures that in case there is a shortfall the…