Opinions

The anti-talks faction of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) has asked an oil and gas company engaged in exploration work in Upper Assam to quit the state within 45 days. There can be little mistake in assessing the situation – it’s a desperate measure by the marginalised faction led by Paresh Baruah to make its presence felt. And it’s doomed to fail. There is, for sure, no need to panic at the threat. Yet Baruah is someone you can dismiss only at your own peril. If nothing, his faction...

When a leopard strayed into and then gracefully left Hema Malini’s bungalow in the Dindoshi area of northwest Mumbai a week or so back, it became an off-beat news item. Something that people ought to have found funny. What with the Dream Girl finding a new fan, and all that. The incident, however, was anything but off-beat. The news media, by and large, missed the point by miles. The point often lies in contextualising an incident, in this case it certainly had. The myopic failed to notice the...

Vodafone Essar’s decision to shoot off a legal notice to a customer for purportedly defamatory comments on his Facebook page goes beyond the legal nitty-grities of publishing comments in cyberspace – it is a frontal attack on free speech, and shows utter contempt for consumer dissent. At the dawn of the social-networking phase of the Internet age, corporates had wallowed over what all wonderful things social media could do for them. They had gone to town about empowerment of citizens, and...

Political machinations in Manipur and Nagaland are often so intertwined that when one catches a cold, the other sneezes, especially when the issue at hand is that of Nagas living in Manipur. So when Nagaland Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio decided to drive into neighbouring Manipur to launch a state unit of his Naga People’s Front (NPF), it understandably caused tremors, the ripples of which as usual were not felt in far away New Delhi. Rio’s decision was met with criticism and stiff resistance in...

No sooner had Mamata Banerjee made her “I am a simple man” gaffe on CNN-IBN, than Twitter went ablaze. Digs and jokes ranged from the derisive to the racist. And sexist, of course. They went on. Yes, accents and pronunciations can indeed be funny. Quite often. And if you are a pundamentalist, you can always have a rolling day out in a multi-lingual country like India. But this Mamata ‘slip of the tongue’ was more a ‘slip of the mind’, and it was certainly not punny. Mamata is not known for her...

The West, led by the United States, has been incessantly pounding Libya in the name of humanity the last few days. Saving humanity, so we are told. Yet, the gravest humanitarian crisis of our times remains grossly neglected by the same self-righteous nations. If the rape of 400,000 girls and women in a 12-month period is not a humanitarian catastrophe, what on earth can be one? If the rape of 1.8 million women in the 15-year Democratic Republic of Congo conflict is not macabre, what on earth can...

In August last year, India’s beleaguered conservationists found something to cheer about after the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) announced that the elephant would now be declared the country’s National Heritage Animal. Whatever that meant. Minister Jairam Ramesh also declared emphatically that the ministry would constitute a National Elephant Conservation Authority (NECA) with the same degree of visibility, importance and criticality as accorded to the National Tiger...

US President Barack Obama’s smug assertion that he had ruled out a drone attack on the Osama bin Laden haven in Abbottabad to avoid civilian casualties is a joke. It is, in fact, a cruel joke on hundreds of innocent people who have been blown to smithereens on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier in brazen drone attacks. When so many could have been passed off as collateral damage in the war on terror earlier, there was no reason why they could not have carried out a drone attack one last, furtive...

If you look at the above picture, you might find it heart-wrenching. You may feel pity for the child. You would even think what crime the child might have committed to deserve this. But that pity could well turn into anger if you were told that it is the current dispensation in Delhi which is, to a considerable extent, responsible for the plight of the child. For, it is the Congress-led regime which has been callous to the perils of a pesticide called endosulfan and has done all within its mite...

You, more often than not, become a product of the times and the circumstances that you live in. If you live in a conflict zone, the incessant bloodletting gets to you sooner than later. Either you become inured to brutalities, or start believing that killing one’s fellow human beings is the only to either to gain salvation or to solve your immediate existentialist problems. But suppose you were to extend this analogy to a place where cattle-rearing is one of the mainstays of the people. Would...