Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati has shut down 10 Reliance Industries superstores after protests by small traders and political activists. Five supermarkets run by another Indian retail chain Spencer’s have also been shut down. Mayawati, who became Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh recently, after a resounding victory, said: I have constituted a high-level committee to […]
A must see movie of this summer, Bourne Ultimatum delivers solid entertainment for those of us tired of the same old, same old Bollywood balderdash. Ever since we read our first Jason Bourne thriller in 1980 – that was Bourne Identity – we’ve been hooked on the late author Robert Ludlum’s best known creation and […]
Did anyone say that politics makes strange bedfellows? Ah, how true. How true. Beleaguered Pakistan President and military chief Pervez Musharraf has held secret talks for a second time with his bitter foe Benazir Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan People’s Party and former Prime Minister of the country. The secret meeting is believed to […]
No, No, No. We are not talking here about Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s controversial thesis on the Clash of Civilizations. We are talking about Huntington’s earlier work, Political Order in Changing Societies (Yale University Press, 1968). In that now forgotten classic, Huntington famously argued in the opening sentence: The most important political distinction among […]
As Delhi’s doddering Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit bumbles along, the city’s killer buses continue their merciless death ride. Particularly eggregious of Delhi’s buses are the privately owned Blueline buses, popularly – and correctly – referred to as the “killer buses.” According to Saturday’s New York Times, the Blueline buses have already claimed 62 lives this […]
It usually takes a lot for the government to get moving in India. But in the case of Pooja Chauhan of Rajkot city in the western Indian state of Gujarat, it actually took a lot less. A lot less clothes, that is. Frustrated by the indifference to her complaints of dowry harassment by her husband […]