Opinions and Editorials

The neighbourhood watch is bringing in strange news. The Army reports that in July, the Chinese carpet-bombed Indian soil with tinned food. A mistake, apparently - no one really knows where the border is supposed to be. And meanwhile, on our other border, the Pakistanis are in the throes of a change of guard that's as quaintly archaic as the one at Buckingham Palace.

Despite his huge popularity and iron grip over Andhra Pradesh, Y.S.R. Reddy was probably not known that well beyond the confines of his own state. But the man, who defied skeptics and the dares of anti-incumbency to deliver 33 Lok Sabha seats in this election, may have ironically preferred it that way. It's this that made YSR an unusual politician for his times.

Controversy was Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy's constant companion in politics - as one who represented violence-prone Cuddapah in Parliament, and the legislative Assembly since the late 1970s. But electoral triumphs buttressed by populist schemes transformed it all for the Andhra CM. In his death, the Congress has lost its strongest regional face in recent memory.

Given the public slanging match between India's top scientists over the success of Pokhran II, the confusion itself calls for keeping our options open for future nuclear testing. In fact, quick and firm responses from the prime minister and a former president have only bolstered the credentials of this controversy, with various other voices joining the polemics.

Adecade ago when Sharad Pawar was quitting the Congress over Sonia Gandhi's foreign origin issue, he told a group of journalists, "In the Congress party, there is no place for genuine mass leaders. There is only the high command and the loyal followers."

Now that Force India has secured a podium finish in the Belgian Grand Prix, isn't it about time we had an Indian driver in the hot seat? With rumours that Ferrari may be eyeing Force India's Giancarlo Fisichella, Vijay Mallya and Co.

There's a lot in the Tintin comics to give offence. George Remi's caricatures are as much about peoples as about the individuals the intrepid Belgian reporter meets in his adventures across continents.

Recent experience shows that States battling the enemy within, especially the scourge of terrorism, draw a fine line between truth and treason. A 20-year jail term for Sri Lankan journalist J.S. Tissainayagam on charges of flouting the country's stringent anti-terror law, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, might be the first time a journalist has been charged under this law.

Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal has once again set the cat among the pigeons - this time over his advocacy of a common, uniform science and mathematics curriculum in schools and with doing away with the multiplicity of school boards in the country.

The dust hasn't yet settled on the crisis in the BJP, but it finally seems to be limping towards a resolution. The intense faction fighting, however, is an 'inner-party problem'. As for the public, two things have become abundantly clear.

At an age when most boys get their hands on their first toy pistol, Shiv Prasad Yadav has earned the dubious distinction of being the world's youngest gangster. Uttar Pradesh's finest have produced him in court for stealing trucks and selling them and, in one electrifying encounter, firing at cops.

Is the RSS itching to play a new role in relation to the BJP? The answer to this question is that the RSS always looks forward to the past.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has argued that the Left needs to engage in a dialogue, particularly on the issue of ending poverty. Perhaps he is urging the Left to look at China, which has catapulted its growth rate in the last 30 years. "There is enough fierceness of the prevailing political arrangement and it has not helped to harness India's potential for a high growth rate.

Forty years is a long time for any ethereal creature. It seems especially long for an almost ubiquitous entity called the Internet. A few weeks after hippies in Woodstock were listening to music and dancing in a rather silly manner in the mud, two computers at the University of California, Los Angeles, hooked up and exchanged equally silly data over an experimental military network called Arpanet.

Modern Japan is still an economy roughly double the size of China with a technological ability second only to the United States. This is a consequence of the winning equation that has ruled the country since the end of World War II.

EGoMs are becoming the preferred forum for decision-making by this government. That may not be a bad thing. A smaller group of ministers is less unwieldy and, therefore, more likely to be firm and decisive (and faster in decision-making) than the full Cabinet. And a collective decision-making process also helps iron out any inter-ministerial differences that may exist on a particular issue.

The UPA government finally began its long-stalled disinvestment programme with the listing of PSU power giant NHPC on the stock market.

It is tempting to see a recovery in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth in the first quarter of the current financial year. That sighting, however, will be flawed. The sequential upturn - from 5.8 per cent in January-March 2009 to 6.1 per cent in the next three months - is misleading because India does not put out seasonally adjusted data.

Jump on to the nearest podium and uncork the bubbly. Sunday's success in the Formula 1 ring has got Indians revving with delight.

That old grandmother of languages, long kept on a ventilator by outdated school curricula, is being given a fresh lease of life by a group of determined enthusiasts. So while in Lucknow, an e-tutorial project aims to put a module of courses online to enable people to study Sanskrit, an academy in Gujarat is using the lure of Bollywood to resuscitate a near-dead language.