Bharatham : Uthishtatha-Jagratha : (wef-05/11/2012. )

"Today's youth is behind cricketers,  film stars, politicians etc, etc --- The Hindu :-30.05.2013 Vivekananda’s legacy of universalism: -------------------------------------------------------- K. N. PANIKKAR He believed that no religion was superior to another. There can be no meeting point between his message and that of the sangh parivar A variety of activities is in the offing to commemorate Swami Vivekananda’s immense contribution to the making of India as a nation. The occasion: the 150th birth anniversary of Swamiji. Seminars, workshops, publications and such other means to perpetuate his memory and assess the significance of his contribution form part of the celebrations. Strangely, at the forefront of this celebration are the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its front organisations. Strange because Vivekananda hardly had anything in common with the sangh parivar, except being Hindu by birth. Devoted Hindu, not communal : ------------------------------------------ Th...

Our country is not supporting and encouraging our Farmers who provide our food. The rulers more worried the big Corporate sector and Q behind Tatas, Birlas, Ambanies etc..etc Remember our Best Prime minister Late Sri Lal Bhahadur Sastri's Slogan "JAY JAWAN ,  JAY kISAN."  These two men are the neglected forgotten. The Hindu 30/05/2013 A story of a banker turned farmer in Bihar : ------------------------------------------------------------- “Farming is fascinating. The only thing is that it requires continuous hard-work and devotion without any distraction” says Mr. Barun Singh, a government bank manager-turned-farmer. Mr. Barun Singh maintains a vermi-composting unit in a portion of his 10 acre land. A dairy unit is attached to the composting unit so that the cattle dung can be easily utilized for the process without much labour involvement. Waste materials like dried leaves, rotten vegetables, fruits etc is spread on a polythene sheet placed on the ground...

The Hindu 29/05/2013 Opinion » Editorial Drugs, Ranbaxy and lies : ---------------------------------- Seven years after the first warning in June 2006 from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and five years after the Department of Justice initiated legal proceedings against the company, Ranbaxy is back in the news for the same wrong reasons. Last fortnight it pleaded guilty to felony charges in the U.S., admitting to selling adulterated drugs with intent to defraud, not reporting that its drugs failed to meet specifications and making intentionally false statements to the government. These are serious charges against any company, not to talk of one from the critical industry of pharmaceuticals, whose products are responsible for curing illnesses and ensuring the well-being of humankind itself. In the event, it is indeed surprising that Ranbaxy managed to get away with a fine of just $500 million. If the charges of the whistle-blower, Dinesh Thakur, are to be believed,...

Sanjay Dutt faces food ban in Yerawada jail Press Trust of India : Mumbai, Tue May 28 2013, 10:49 hrs   Yerawada jail authorities today moved a designated TADA court against allowing home food to actor Sanjay Dutt citing the prison manual which does not provide for extension of such a facility. Sanjay Dutt, who is lodged in Yerawada Central prison in Pune, was allowed to have home food and medicines by the TADA court, when he surrendered on May 16 to serve his remaining 42 months sentence following his conviction in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case. The application was filed today and would be heard in due course, according to jailor Yogesh Desai. The 53-year-old actor was first taken to Arthur Road jail after his surrender and later shifted to Yerawada prison. The jail authorities are yet to take a decision on the mandatory manual work the actor is supposed to undertake as an inmate. He is currently being kept in a separate cell for security reasons. The last t...

God's own country's Tamasha!!!     Seemed Muslim League and Kerala Congress rule the state?

            The Indian Express 26/05/2013 Missing them, again Pratap Bhanu Mehta :  Fri May 24 2013, 01:21 hrs   Low female workforce participation is an intricate challenge of our time India's social self-knowledge is being stunted. Politics is hugely important and rightly so. Politics structures society. But the specific form of our politics seems to make it, even more than religion, a kind of opium: more a distraction that gets us high, than a deliberative exercise that confronts reality. There is little patience in understanding the delicate capillaries that nourish society. A perfect example of this was the passing over of what might turn out to be a very consequential debate for India's future: the low rates of female workforce participation in India. At a superficial level, the picture is dismal. India, globally, ranks eleventh from the bottom in female workforce participation; after hovering around the 30 per cent m...

          The India Express 26/05/2013   The endless war Meghnad Desai : Sun May 26 2013, 02:49 hrs   When the Cold War ended, many people thought this would be the beginning of perpetual peace. There was talk of a Peace Dividend. But almost as soon as one war ended, another began. This was the War on Terror. Cynics said the US always had to have an enemy so it invented this new war. But the cynics had not read their history properly. The most recent decapitating of a British soldier on the streets of London has brought home the lessons of history. The War on Terror is not a new war. To understand it, we need to go back a hundred years.     One way to understand the history of the 20th century is to see it as unwinding the problems created by the First World War, which ended 94 years ago. First, the German problem occupied Europe which took us to the Second World War. But also during the First World War, the Easter...

    The Hindu 26/05/2013   Opinion » Columns » Kalpana Sharma   HE OTHER HALF      KALPANA SHARMA     Child sexual abuse in juvenile justice institutions [in India] is rampant, systematic and has reached epidemic proportions,’ says a damning report from the Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR). This past week, “rape” is once again the topic of discussion. There has been despair and outrage because this time we also have to talk about a child, a girl, just five years old. Just as the young woman gang-raped on December 16, 2012 was not the first, and certainly not the last, this little girl sadly is also not the first, nor the last. Even the daily list of rapes that now inhabit our news pages does not indicate the extent of the sickness that is now staring us in the face. According to a distressing report by the Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR), 48,338 children have been raped in the decade between 2001 and ...

          The Hindu 26/05/2013   Opinion » Columns » Kalpana Sharma   THE OTHER HALF Cyberspace violence      Kalpana Sharma   Women in public life are vulnerable not just to criticism about their views but also to personal abuse. The face and voice of Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association, became familiar to viewers across India and around the world when she spoke clearly and fearlessly after the December 16, 2012, gang rape incident in Delhi. She minced no words about what this meant for Indian women and what it revealed about the state of governance. In this time of social media and the Internet, voices such as Kavita’s are amplified. Even if the mainstream media had ignored her, she would have been heard. Today, thanks to this kind of exposure, Kavita has been recognised by many mainstream television channels as an articulate and passionate advocate for w...

The Hindu 26/05/2013   Opinion » Columns » Kalpana Sharma   THE OTHER HALF A life they did not choose      Kalpana Sharma   When it comes to women, success stories are heard more easily than the voice of those who fight the odds every day. Summer is often called the “silly season”. Nothing much happens. People go away on holidays. In Mumbai, the city where I live, the roads are a little less jammed, the trains fractionally emptier. During these times, people in the news business welcome a scandal, something with which to fill their news hours. So spot-fixing is the flavour of this “silly season” even as the never-ending IPL season finally draws to a close. As a result, the concerns of women have slipped under the radar. Campaigns launched last year, after the December 16 gang-rape in Delhi, have ended. It is as if enough has been written and said about women and that now we can all sit back. But can we? I ask myself that a...

        That's the IPL. Take it to the cleaners, for a thorough scrub down :       Frankly, it is too tempting not to start this Saturday's National Interest with a "we told you so". On May 10, 2008, K. Shriniwas Rao, then in the brilliant Indian Express sports bureau, laid bare clubby connections, convenient corporate morality and the many conflicts of interest in the IPL in a comprehensive story headlined, most aptly, 'Indian Parivar League'. It brought me an angry late night call from Lalit Modi. But not a single fact has ever been denied. I, as an incorrigible cricket — and IPL — enthusiast, also contributed my bit ('Conflicts of Cricket', National Interest, June 20, 2009, goo.gl/bgP8K). But the IPL environment was too testosterone- and cash-driven to bother about any such aberration. The BCCI, in any case, is the most cosily multi-partisan political body in India. One where arch antagonists such as Rajiv Shukla and N...

          The Hindu 25/05/2013   MATTHEW ADUKANIL   Whoever said Faith is dead? That religion has become obsolete? Faith is still alive and kicking. It’s only that its address has changed. It has a new portal. In fact, man cannot live without some kind of faith or other. Now and for aye. True, fewer people go to church. Few believe in God. Few profess a religion. But it does not follow therefore that faith is dead. Non sequitur. Many of those who believed in God earlier have now just switched to the forces of the universe as expounded in the bestseller The Secret. Many who have given up the Jesus of Nazareth are ready to believe in the Jesus of Kashmir if the media proclaim him. If they cannot accept Mary Magdalene as a devout disciple of Christ as the gospels testify they readily welcome her as his mistress or wife if The Da Vinci Code or some mysteriously discovered little fragment of papyrus in Rome says so. If, for centuri...

  The Hindu 25/05/2013 Opinion » Editorial It’s time to go, Mr. Srinivasan   Cricket in India stands on the edge of a precipice and if it is to be saved, the men who have allowed the game to be placed in mortal danger must take responsibility for their acts of omission and commission. What began as a betting and spot-fixing scandal involving three players in one Indian Premier League team now seems to have drawn in team owners, and the man at the very top of cricket administration in India. N. Srinivasan is both the president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India and owner of Chennai Super Kings and he is in the dock today for the way he has run both enterprises. His son-in-law, Gurunath Meiyappan, who was also Team Principal of the Chennai Super Kings, has now been arrested by the Mumbai police. He is being investigated for his contacts with an actor who served as a conduit for bookies. The manner in which a blatant falsehood is now being peddled by ...

The Hindu 25/05/2013   "Stories they tell about languages:" Rama Kant Agnihotri   The idea that a tongue spoken by a large number of people across a territory is ‘pure’ and therefore must not be changed is wrong Our perception of language, formulation of language policies and their implementation, and our attitudes to other languages are all almost invariably polluted by the myths about language that we effortlessly inherit, nourish and transmit to our subsequent generations; we make sure that the damage is irreparable and irreversible. As long ago as 1620, Francis Bacon in his celebrated Novum Organum warned us against the idols of the ‘Cave, Tribe, Theatre and the Market Place’ that impede any scientific enquiry. We persistently refuse to listen to him. Unless some major steps are taken at the school and college levels, and the study of language is brought out of the clutches of traditional prescriptive rote-learnt grammar to be replaced by a scientific ...

  Hindustan Times 24/05/2013 Sujata Anandan   A friend of mine who had to recently visit Mantralaya on business has not been able to stop grumbling. “Nothing moves. I tried my luck with everyone: the ministers, the bureaucrats, even the clerks and junior staff. No one takes decisions and no paper moved even an inch the entire week that I had to spend there. It was never like this.” When I asked around, I discovered it was not just my businessman friend who was whining. Practically every politician and bureaucrat has a problem with the other and all have a common grouse – the chief minister. As far as I can see, Prithviraj Chavan is accused by all of being over cautious and too careful by far in giving permissions and sanctioning projects and that necessarily slows down the entire movement of files and papers from one department to the other. I am told the chief minister trusts very few people and, therefore, delegating of powers and responsibilities does not ...