Opinions and Editorials

As the dust settles following the abandonment of the Nano plant in Singur by the Tatas, there are plenty of lessons to go around.

Churches vandalised. Innocent Christians attacked. This recent spurt in communal violence cannot be condoned or justified by any right-thinking Indian. There can be no place for vandalism and violence-especially violence fuelled by religious hatred-in a law-governed society. The guilty must be punished.

When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met US President George Bush at the White House for dinner, the Indian delegation, besides Singh, had all officials, including two joint secretaries.

I was in Kolkata on work for a day. As the day wore on, it became clear that I would need to stay for one more night. So I booked the company guesthouse for another night. But shortly after checking in there in the evening, I realised that most of the TV channels I could be interested in watching had not been subscribed to, and I had forgotten to bring a book that I could spend my time reading.

When the ban on smoking in public places came into effect last Thursday I did not know whether to laugh or cry.

I returned to India in the summer of 1965 after four years abroad. Panditji had passed away and Lal Bahadur Shastri was the PM. As I went to cinema quite often, I would see that anytime Shastri appeared in the weekly Newsreel, people would laugh. I was there for only 10 weeks between July and September. By the time I left, the India-Pakistan war had broken out.

He was the epitome of physical fitness: tall, lean and ramrod straight. He carried himself with the dignity of the police officer he had been until his retirement. And he was, quite fittingly, our school's physical trainer and athletics coach. Mr Tomlinson (or Tommy as we cheekily nicknamed him) enjoyed his PT classes as much as we disliked them.

The continued failure of hope leads to despair, just as utterly containable disturbances allowed to persist lead to crises.

It seems the long and winding road to Singur has finally hit a permanent roadblock. Ratan Tata has announced that Tata Motors will relocate its Nano plant.

The appointment of General Ahmed Shuja Pasha as ISI chief is a significant development. The News (September 30) reports: "In a major reshuffle at command, staff and instructional assignments in the Pakistan Army, newly promoted Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha has been appointed chief of Pakistan's premier intelligence outfit - the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

What image of Singur will prove to be the most enduring in public memory in the short and rather fragile history of Bengal's revival of the industrial project? Not as a spot of lush green, fertile agricultural land, nor a brief hub of nascent industrial activity glowing brightly at night amidst the surrounding dark, but as Fort Singur, under siege, where die-hard Marxists try to nurture and pr

As she prepares to sign the 123 agreement in New Delhi on Saturday, the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice has every reason to celebrate the successful conclusion of the historic civil nuclear initiative that she had launched during her first visit to India three and a half years ago.

The last thing a columnist should do is begin an argument on an apologetic note, and certainly that is not what readers of National Interest have come to expect.

"I am just another common man" says Naseeruddin Shah in the hit film A Wednesday, as he threatens to set Mumbai on fire.

If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can," the esteemed Oxford philosopher Timothy Williamson told the Aristotelian Society, of London, a few years ago.

With the passing away of Mahendra Kapoor, we have lost yet another of the very few left from Hindi cinema's golden era.

In January 1966, after Lal Bahadur Shastri's sudden death in Tashkent, Congress party bosses, collectively nicknamed "The Syndicate", met to smoothen the second succession within 18 months.

The lights are going out all over India, and we will not see them lit again in our - possibly lengthened - lifetimes.

Words have a way of coming into fashion unannounced. In September 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh remarked, "Unless the 'beat constable' is brought into the vortex of our counter-terrorist strategy, our capacity to pre-empt future attacks would be severely limited.

There's leadership in the Congress and the government it runs, isn't there? In that case now is the time the party and government leadership must step in and stamp on a dangerous political misadventure some Congress leaders appear to have embarked on.