Politics

Every few months or seasons, someone raises the undying issue of Bangalore's decaying nightlife and the exigent need to resuscitate it. This time it has been the Tourism Vision Group which, in its report to the Karnataka government last week, called for the dire need for the state capital to shed its embarrassing "boring" tag, and push the current 11pm deadline that brings life to a standstill by another two hours. The group that made the suggestion is high-profile, not one that can be dissed...

We Bangloreans need to rejoice. The pre-event hype and the subsequent glee, bordering almost on the hysterical, over the launch of WiFi hubs in the city give one the impression that all our problems on earth have been solved. But this euphoria can only be ephemeral, as one would soon realise that one's attention had been needlessly diverted. The back-breaking roads are still there, the non-existent foothpaths haven't reappeared, the stench of garbage has not been replaced by fresh air, and the...

Bangalore South is one of those few constituencies in the country the bulk of whose electorate is the target group of all the three major political formations. It is reckoned to be a prestigious constituency, and in terms of ethnicities is as demographically fragmented as any other in the country. And now it's become the cynosure of all eyes, with talk of former Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani being the possible Congress candidate for the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections. Even though Nilekani...

India is leaking like a tap. Money is flowing out of the country, and there seems no way of plugging the breach. Crime, corruption, and tax evasion drained US$344 billion from India between 2002 and 2011. Illicit financial flows, in fact, have jumped more than 10 times from $7.9 billion in 2002 to roughly $85 billion in 2011. The findings—which peg cumulative illicit financial outflows from developing countries at US$5.9 trillion —are part of a new study published Thursday by Global Financial...

The trouble with a knee-jerk reaction is that it not only fails to address a problem at hand, but complicates matters as well. The response of the Karnataka home minister KJ George to Wednesday's horrific attack on a woman at a Bangalore ATM is precisely that. The minister, in his infinite wisdom, has asked banks to post guards at these kiosks within three days, or shut them down. In his desperation to sound pro-active, George has failed to see a number of things. First, for a city with 2500...

Even as Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi on Saturday was exhorting the IT sector to lead the country towards progress and his media managers putting brains together for the much-hyped rally here on Sunday, a fast one was being pulled on him. And that too in Bangalore itself — a multi-purpose cargo berth and a barge jetty of the Kandla Port Trust (which is located in the Gulf of Kutch) were remotely inaugurated by Union minister for shipping GK Vasan at a function in the city. The ostensible...

The much-awaited public screening of Fabricated, based on the case of Abdul Nasser Maudany, will be held in Bangalore on Saturday. This screening is part of a nationwide campaign to focus on the scourge of falsely implicating activists, political opponents, and fighters for peoples' causes wantonly by the State. The film's director, KP Sasi, in this freewheeling interview with dna talks about the larger context of fabricated cases. Q: Your film deals with the issue of undertrials and fabricated...

So, one of India’s most wanted men, Mallojula Koteswara Rao a.k.a. Kishenji, has been eliminated from the Maoist theatre. There are many who are heaving a sigh of relief, there are others who argue that this is the beginning of the end of the Maoists. But arguments steeped in speculation are essentially bad arguments. They leave out the context, and are therefore myopic. Kishenji’s death in an encounter on November 24 came even as parleys were on between the Maoists and the Trinamool Congress...

The word ‘democracy’ is one of the most abused in today’s world. A watch on the news front will provide you with glaring instances. Let us keep away from the villains we love to hate – politicians, bureaucrats and corporates, and look at the mess we are in from a peoples’ point of view. After all, democracy, we are told time and again, is about people. A democracy is built on several foundation stones – that of freedom and the right to dissent being the most critical. If you don’t have freedom...

The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), Russian novelist Mid-November brought some distressing news – more than four persons per day were killed in police and judicial custody in India between 2001 and 2010. The exact number would be 14,231. The New Delhi-based Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) in its report, Torture in India 2011, revealed that a large majority of these deaths were a direct consequence of torture in...