Opinions

The protests over Cauvery waters in Karnataka, particularly in capital Bengaluru, have made headlines the country over. But lost in the din has been a string of demonstrations of a much smaller scale in the city: over tree-felling for widening roads under the controversial TenderSURE project. Both, however, have shown the disconnect the city’s corporate elite have with popular sentiments and ground realities. Having been caught on the wrong foot over both protests, the elite is now making...

As far as court judgments go, those often don't make sense to an ordinary reader. And not without reason, for they are often mired in dense legalese, or the subjects of the orders themselves don't matter a bit to ordinary people—there's a disconnect somewhere. Moreover, writings about such nebulous subjects often get lost in translation (from legalese to simple language). The Supreme Court judgment of May 13, refusing to decriminalise defamation, is one such instance. Much of the debate on the...

Politicians from mainland India, bogged down by their own mainstream and patronising narrative of what development or nationalism ought to mean, hardly ever get the ground situation right as far as the Northeast is concerned. All the more so with Assam, an anthropologist’s dream-come-true and a demagogue’s proverbial nightmare. This was amply evident from the cavalier way in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi kicked off the election campaign for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Kokrajhar on...

The advantage with hindsight is that even the proverbial fool, after the event, gets the chance of a lifetime to become wise. No, the event one is alluding to here is not the Chennai cataclysm, but the one that had ravaged Mumbai ten monsoons back. There had been a lesson in urban planning for all and sundry there; for coastal city Chennai, especially so. The Mumbai floods had been as much about unbridled concretisation and unabated corruption, as it had been about frenetic altering of land...

The heat and dust generated by the hateful and acrimonious exchanges over the Karnataka government's decision to celebrate the birth anniversary of Tipu Sultan will settle down sooner or later. As in all other debates, there are merits and demerits in the arguments being put forward by both proponents and detractors; but what has been missing from most contentions is the role of the man central to the conflagration – the state's chief minister, S Siddaramaiah. Before one delves into the...

In the first week of October, what was hitherto only looming large over the trade horizon became a disturbing reality. Twelve countries announced the inking of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) after years of clandestine negotiations. Though the partnership has not yet been ratified by lawmakers from the member countries of the Pacific Rim that constitute the bloc, it is likely to cause a flutter in global trade equations. And affect India’s already-declining exports, too...

The accord between the Government of India and the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah) is definitely not an accord by any measure; what has been announced, if anything at all, is only a statement of intent. Most of the ongoing discourse has either bordered on "whataboutery" or been academic speculation. Neither is off the mark, and yet neither is fair. For, the history of Naga insurrection is a history of failed accords, one of repeated acts of treachery and skulduggery by the...

The ancient Romans had a widely-used adage: Ovem lupo committere. Translated into English, the Latin expression would mean: to set a wolf to guard the sheep. The construct has had many variations and mutations over time and across geographies, but the essence remains the same. This thought would cross one’s mind many times over while going through the report of the High-Level Committee (HLC) that was constituted to review Acts administered by the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate...

On January 10, 1929, a memorandum signed by 20 members of the Naga Club was submitted to the Indian Statutory Commission, also known as the Simon Commission, demanding exclusion of the Naga Hills from the Province of Assam. The underlying fear was that the Nagas would be lost in a sea of Indians if they came to be administered by the latter. John Hutton, an anthropologist who was the Deputy Commissioner of the Naga Hills, even suggested to the commission that a separate North-Eastern Frontier...

When they were launched, the then Web-based and now app-based cab companies had come in as a breath of fresh air for consumers dog tired of what they were having to deal with. But just a few years down the line, many consumers are now sobering up to the contention that they (the companies) are pretty much like the errant auto-wallahs and callous taxi-drivers that they had promised to replace. Not a day goes by without an adverse report on these cab companies, be it Meru or Ola, be it Uber or...