Opinions and Editorials

The government's one-size-fits-all panacea to ensuring quality in educational institutions has been "control".

The numbers tell us the United States is out of recession. According to the US commerce department, America's GDP grew at an annualised rate of 3.5 per cent in this year's third quarter, following four straight quarters in which it shrank. But it may be too soon to beat the drums and bang the gongs of celebration. There are some questions to be asked first.

It goes well beyond the occasional confessional outburst. Written in the pages of his memoir Andre Agassi has done the nasty by revealing a shocking secret that he guarded for so long. That Agassi, the golden boy of tennis, an eight-time Grand Slam champion, lied about substance abuse in order to escape a ban has come as a shock to most.

What makes it even more challenging to understand a personality like Indira Gandhi even 25 years after her passing is the fact that you are not talking about one person, but three.

Just when Indian industry has gone into an overdrive to optimise costs, a number of sectors are surely going to feel the pinch of the 11% increase in coal prices.

Finally, there is some good economic news out of the world's largest economy. US GDP grew by 3.5% in the quarter between July and September, a sharp jump from the either lethargic or negative growth rates recorded in the most recent four quarters. To the extent that this downturn is in part a confidence game, such good news is always welcome. It will boost consumer and investor sentiment.

When the paper asked me to write about Indira Gandhi, what started as a piece of political analysis, ended up becoming a personal journey.

It was 1969, the year Jimi Hendrix played 'The Star Spangled Banner' at Max Yasgur's farm, the year the Beatles broke up, the year man landed on the freakin' moon.

What distinguishes the latest chapter in India's volatile land narrative is that it stars the Army. As The Indian Express has been reporting, senior officers appear to be involved in a fraudulent scheme to transfer land in Sukna to a sham educational society. The concerned land is located in the Himalayan foothills in Darjeeling, West Bengal.

In a previous column in this series (IE, September 4), the narrative of the 1965 India-Pakistan War was brought up to the crucial date of September 11, 1965 when Ayub Khan, a realist for all his faults, knew that for Pakistan the war was over.

This could have made news 60 years ago. And even then, it would have been shocking. For the fact of Dalits entering a temple to make headlines in the 21st century only goes to show that untouchability is far from a bygone evil.

Andre Agassi has just added a convenient truth to an earlier, convenient lie. In an attempt to come out smelling of roses, he does far too much damage to those who look up to him, and other sportsmen, as role models. At the best of times it's a flawed equation, this assumption that a fine sportsman is a fine person, but it exists and I fear Agassi may have given people reason to indulge in drugs.

During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis the Kennedy government had released aerial photographs of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

If MPs on a Lok Sabha panel get their way, they could soon give themselves and their colleagues a five-fold increase in the monies they can disperse on capital works in their constituencies.

Indira Gandhi's place in modern Indian history is deeply paradoxical. Her policies, actions and outlook on power made Indian democracy fragile to the point of destruction. The Emergency was simply symptomatic of a larger trend towards institutions. She had, during her tenure, wilfully assaulted every single institution: the judiciary, federalism, the police.

The unrest in Iran since the June 12 presidential election is, without a doubt, the most significant sequence of events in the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution.

There are moments in history when wrong decisions are taken; the effects of which are felt for ages," said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, at the end of a long peroration on the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

"Shame. On. You. BBC!" "Nazi. Scum! Off. Our. Streets!" Facing a wall of policemen, anti-fascists and anti-racists screamed at the top of their lungs.

Exactly 40 years ago, the first message on what we call the Internet today was transmitted. That transmission, brief as it was, wasn't completed before the system—linking together machines at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute crashed. Only the 'lo' part of the 'log in' went through. Poetic prescience you could argue, given that synecdoche is so triumphant in our times.

eGoM stories At the first meeting of the empowered group of ministers on the KG-D6 fields, the first minister to arrive was minister for chemicals & fertilisers M Alagiri.