Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik exudes confidence about bouncing back to power for the fourth time in succession and increasing his tally in the Lok Sabha after winning over prominent Congress leaders to his side and gobbling up the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM). The state votes on April 10 and 17 to elect a 147-member Assembly and 21 members to the Lok...
Israel, which is two-thirds desert, is using the most advanced water-management technologies to transform itself into a water-surplus nation in less than a decade.. At the turn of the millennium, Israel faced the urgent requirement to either greatly expand its water supply, or curb its economic growth. The decision was to expand its water supply, and on Oct....
As I discussed last week, the fundamental problem that Ukraine poses for Russia, beyond a long-term geographical threat, is a crisis in internal legitimacy. Russian President Vladimir Putin has spent his time in power rebuilding the authority of the Russian state within Russia and the authority of Russia within the former Soviet Union. The events in Ukraine ...
A few years back, I was talking with some female employees of my company. The topic was pranayama and I was telling them the value of mudras in pranayama. To demonstrate, I asked them to close their eyes to observe the flow of breath with each mudra. These women, who were not even matriculates, eagerly did this eye closing pose and followed what I said with ...
The term ‘bias’ is defined as an inclination of temperament or outlook to present or hold a partial perspective and a refusal to even consider the possible merits of alternative points of view. An individual may be biased towards or against another individual, a race, a religion, a social class, or a political party. Being biased connotes being one-sided, la...
The outcome of the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections will determine the pace and direction of the economy and the nation for the next decade. The great churning is expected by most observers to throw up a different set of rulers. Replacing the current lot with a new one, however, will not make much of a difference by itself. The country will benefit from the f...
Launching his campaign as the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) candidate in East Delhi constituency, Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, attacked Narendra Modi and demanded that he ‘come clean on his election funding and subject himself to media scrutiny on his so-called achievements’. Long an academic in the United States and well-known on the capital’s ‘secu...
Shinichi Inoue, a former President of the Japanese Miyazaki Bank and reputed economist, has proposed a novel approach to economic management that goes beyond socialism and capitalism. He calls his proposed economics for the 21st century ‘Buddhist Economics’, a phrase first used in print by EF Schumacher in his 1973 best-seller, “Small is...
Nobody expected events to move on with such a breath-taking speed. The Russians took their time; they sat on the fence and watched while the Brown storm-troopers conquered Kiev, and they watched while Mrs Victoria Nuland of the State Department and her pal Yatsenyuk (“Yats”) slapped each other’s backs and congratulated themselves on their quick victory. They...
The people of Kerala are feeling fatigue. Kerala as a melting pot of political experiments has lost all hope in the present day political coalitions. In 1958, Kerala experimented with the coalition model as the newborn linguistic state wanted to avert the growing Communist threat. Unfortunately within a decade the Communists monopolized the art of coalition....
Ukraine: When it gets complicated and confusing, when you’re overwhelmed with too much information, changing daily; too many explanations, some contradictory … try putting it into some kind of context by stepping back and looking at the larger, long-term picture.
The United States strives for world domination, hegemony wherever possible, their main occupati...
The bugle has been blown. Lok Sabha elections will be held in nine phases between April 7 and May 12. So, in the coming weeks,
A government which has presided over the most venal, corrupt and incompetent administration since independence,
A government which has intentionally pushed up prices of cereals, pulses, milk, vegetables and other essential comm...
A war of words has broken out in the media after a co-convener of the Maharashtra BJP communication cell tweeted an endorsement of his incorruptibility by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The Congress challenged the claim and on Monday the whistleblower website called the endorsement a fake. Wikileaks has since then released a number of tweets on the...
North of Latakia, Syria: Every school kid here in Syria learns at an early age about the various colonial land grabs that have lopped off key parts of their ancient country, and they receive instruction about their national duty to recover this sacred territory. The concept applies equally to still-occupied Palestine, or at least it did before the 2011 upris...
The inquisitorial type proceedings we are witnessing today at the UNHRC in Geneva in the name of Human Rights are nothing but a sham. In a nutshell, the UNHRC sessions are full of hypocrisy and humbug; an abuse of process in the most shameful manner. It reminds us of the crazy times of the Christian Inquisition in Europe which lasted for over 600 years, wher...
In Buddhism, it is said that thoughts run this world. Currently, the habituation of thoughts and re-circuiting of the brain is happening in the name of education, advertisements etc. Humanity has been enslaved by the elitists who run this world to divert the wealth of humanity to a small group that essentially controls money. From a neuro-scientific perspect...
Indians who have been facing terrorist attacks for decades will condemn the dastardly attack at Kunming railway station in the early hours on March 2 that took 29 innocent lives. Over 100 people were reported injured in the attack. The masked terrorists wielding fruit knives struck wildly at the people crowding the station. Xinhua reported that a gang of eig...
1] Two invasions: The stakes are high in the Ukraine: after the coup, as Crimea and Donbas asserted their right to self determination, American and Russian troops entered Ukrainian territory, both under cover. The American soldiers are “military advisors”, ostensibly members of Blackwater private army (renamed Academi); a few hundred of them patrol Kiev whil...
Indira Gandhi once said, “We don’t, in this country, want a nation of blind followers of anybody, no matter howsoever great and I know that every great man has deplored this attitude, every great man has said: think for yourselves, test each belief, test each saying before you decide whether it is right for you and for the...
The Prime Minister’s approval of GM food and Environment Minister Moily’s disregard for rules, illegally permitting open field trials of 120 food crops will destroy India at the genetic level. In an election year, Manmohan Singh is leaving behind a scorched India. A blind, deaf, dumb and bigoted Prime Minster said ‘the government should not succumb to...
The Aam Aadmi Party’s links with questionable activists in India make sense if one studies its ‘Made in UK’ agenda, which explains the seemingly disparate causes it espouses, and its visceral hatred towards the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate. Informed sources say that the AAP core leaders are only foot soldiers whose task is to...
Official American policy regarding the Ukraine, Russia, Putin and democracy has left the realm of ignorance and can only be described as stupid. Even the pressure of running an empire and maintaining capitalism are not enough to excuse present behavior and actions, previously labeled by some as demented but presently, and however more dangerous, no more or l...
President Obama’s scheduled visit to Saudi Arabia at the end of March may be aimed at cementing the Washington-Riyadh resolve to widen the military involvement to remove the Syrian government under Bashar al-Assad. All indicators suggest that the US President is preparing to join hands with the jihadi-financing Wahhabi Keeper of Two Holy Mosques, Saudi King ...
In the latest color revolution, it was not an army but a rump parliament that pulled the plug on the elected president on a wave of protest, pushing out Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovich on 22 February. He apologized from exile in the Russian city of Rostov-on-the-Don for his weakness during the uprising, but his fate was sealed when he was disowned by his own Par...
Sri Lanka will face the flak at the 25th session of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) for the third time this week when the US fields its draft resolution on Sri Lanka’s accountability over its conduct during and after the Eelam War. US Secretary of State John Kerry spoke of his country’s keenness to do so as the Sri Lanka government “still has not answere...
Identifying the issue in a case is the key to success in legal studies. Once the issue is determined, arguments and counter-arguments can be propounded to understand and untangle the broader implications of law. But issue spotting is also helpful in identifying a problem that needs to be solved in a non-legal context. Keeping this in mind, let us determine t...
Wendy Doniger’s 779-page tome titled, The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009) is a hurtful book, laced with personal editorials, folksy turn of the phrase and funky wordplays. She has a large repertoire of Hindu mythological stories, and often narrates the most damning story - Vedic, Puranic, folk, oral, vernacular - to demean, damage and disparage Hindui...
Sri Lanka’s foreign policy must tilt towards extracting the maximum support and assistance from countries that have a shared Buddhist heritage, because these countries are our natural allies. A shared past acts as a powerful reminder of a sense of duty to one another particularly in times of crisis. This is true in human affairs. It is equally true in intern...
The proposed doubling of the indigenously produced natural gas price from April will hit everyone (except gas producers) hard. Since the move is mala fide, since it will cause the country an estimated loss of Rs. 54,500 crore every year, since it is an assault on the economic sovereignty of the country, since it will become effective at the fag end of this g...
The unacceptable and insulting way in which Andhra Pradesh was divided shakes any residual trust left in India’s democratic institutions. The way both the Government and the Opposition leadership colluded in the Lok Sabha confirms the suspicions about the compromised leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). If dissent can be stifled and dirty tricks u...
Since when are revolutions supported by imperialism? Washington, which failed in 2011 to bomb Libya and Syria simultaneously, is now engaged in a new demonstration of its strength: organizing regime change in three states at the same time, in different regions of the world: Syria (CentCom), Ukraine (EuCom) and Venezuela (SouthCom).
To do this, President O...