Blogs

On 24 May 2013, CPI MP (Gurudas) Dasgupta convened a media conference during which he circulated excerpts from a note dated 14 May prepared for the Cabinet together with a letter he had written to the prime minister. In it he alleged that the ministries of finance, petroleum and natural gas and the Planning Commission were ‘colluding’ to push the price of natural gas from the D6 wells in the Krishna-Godavari basin (that were being operated by RIL) way above what had been recommended by the...

By luck or deliberate strategy, or a combination of both, the execution of the refinery project in Jamnagar transformed Mukesh (Ambani) from an introvert into a confident entrepreneur, who no longer shied away from public appearances. He still had few friends, but interacted comfortably with the Who’s Who of India and the world and entertained them lavishly. By the end of the 1990s, Mukesh was truly convinced that he was the legitimate heir to Dhirubhai’s legacy, that he was the one chosen by...

It is not often that conservationists, during times when pursuit of a frenzied double-digit growth is a national obsession, find something to cheer about. The Supreme Court order of Monday asking Gujarat to translocate Asiatic lions to Madhya Pradesh will come across as something that happens once in a blue moon. For those wildlife conservationists campaigning for the process, this is good news indeed. The apex court felt that the lions should have a second home especially if an epidemic or...

If one were to go just by the sheer numbers documented in the annual Amnesty International report on death penalty that was released last week, prima facie it would seem there is not much to write about India. Prima facie, of course. After all, on the face of it, the big numbers of 2012 are mostly about other countries: Only 21 of the world’s countries were recorded as having carried out executions in 2012 – the same number as in 2011, but down from 28 countries a decade earlier in 2003. In 2012...

In early 2006, when I was publishing-editing the now-moribund Newswatch, I had carried out a study on the state of freedom of expression in India for an international free speech network. The findings were not disquieting for those abreast with the state of affairs in the country; but there were some indicators that were a cause for worry, at least for me. Most journalists we surveyed were found to be grossly nescient about free speech issues, people who wouldn’t for their wretched life write...

This was sometime in the late 1980s. Summer was beginning to slyly set in. And the sight of the dry and dusty look of Agartala airport that I fleetingly caught as I peeked out of the plane’s window filled me up with disgust. Like Gollum, I was consumed by hatred – I wanted to hate everything about the Northeast – even its summer. I had been feeling disgusted the last six months anyway, and there was only one thing that I deeply desired – leave the Northeast, for good. And now that I indeed was...

The Indian government wouldn't want you to see this Channel 4 film. This is how the makers of the documentary describe the film: In the most militarised place on earth, one man is standing up to the armed might of the world's largest democracy. 'Kashmir's Torture Trail' follows a Kashmiri lawyer as he uncovers India's best kept secret. With the world's media attention focused on repression in Syria and the threat to the Euro, the Indian state of Kashmir, nestling in the shadow of the Himalayas...

Shortly after it dawned on all and sundry that what was initially thought of as only a gang war, was in fact a concerted attack by terrorists on the night of November 26, 2008, all eyes of the nation, and the world, were trained on Mumbai. The coverage of the attacks was to become a watershed in India’s television history. But hardly had the first night wore on, signs of criticism of the coverage began surfacing. Over Facebook status messages, through SMSs, and subsequently through blogs and...

[This is an excerpt from the thesis submitted by Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976) to the Communist Party of India in 1954. The thesis remained buried for many years, and was accidentally discovered among old files in the Party office in 1993. This is the preamble to the thesis.] We are witnessing a curious phenomenon today. We are witnessing an unprecedented expansion of progressive influence in the cultural sphere. Through their art, many common artists, from professional and other fields, are...

In certain situations, people actually salivate when they desire material things, like money and sports cars, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "In multiple languages, the terms hunger and salivation are used metaphorically to describe desire for non-food items," writes author David Gal (Northwestern University). "But will people actually salivate when they desire material things?" The answer, Gal found, is yes. In one study, for example, Gal examined whether people...