ISSUES AND CONCERNS

Friends We are at the end of Financial Year. It is a month where union budgets are discussed across the media. Election to the Loksabha being only a few months away, customary budget was given a go by. The vote on a/c, by both the Railway Minister and the Finance Minister have been presented to the parliament. Railway Minister, although, belonging to Karnataka, did not show any special favours to his state. While this being a fair policy, it has its own valid arguments against it. But what most ministers in railway, in fact all railway ministers in the past, have only played the development card, instead of development per se. Budget allocations are done according to the demand from either the political class or the general public. Announcement in the budget, not necessarily leads to the project. It takes its own time to start, having started, it never runs through a planned programme of completion. There are any number of projects started, but languishing at different levels of ...

TAMIL NADU: A politico-family drama is on in Tamil Nadu. Accusations and counter accusations by Karunanidhi (MK) siblings is bound to hasten the political eclipse of Karunanidhi family. With number of wives, M Karunanidhi is already having problem keeping everybody happy with appropriate political positions. Thus DMK has become a family affair of MK, with Maran’s on the sidelines. If Alagiri has been accused of cursing Stalin, that he would die soon, Alagiri’s complaint is that both his father and brother Stalin did not greet him on his birthday. Adding to this was “Cruel remarks on Stalin broke my heart” by M.Karunanidhi. Now this indeed is a height of comedy. Father is a seasoned politician with over 60 years political life and both sons similarly in politics for over 2/3 decades. It is really funny to hear their petty public spat. Surely their beite noire Jayalalitha is having a hearty laugh, and is already preparing to use such bickerings to her advantage by showing the dram...

INDIAN IN COWBOY COUNTRY THE INTERVIEW Tom Holcombe was a jovial and jocular Texan who belonged to a prominent family that owned ranches that had turned into oilfields. He grew up in Fort Worth, but rather than joining the family ranks in managing ranches and production fields, he became an accountant at an American bank with worldwide operations. He had worked for over twenty years, and had recently taken a sabbatical to rethink his life.  Satish and Priya had met him at a festival of Satyajit Ray films at Rice University. He, like them, saw every film in this festival. After the third film or so, they began to acknowledge each other in the lobby. After the fifth film, they had discussions on the master’s work during a break, and after the last film, he invited the two of them to join him for dinner at a great Ethiopian restaurant that he’d just discovered.   He regaled them with his stories and experiences, especially in Asia and India. He had gone on a tige...

ARE WE BARKING UP THE WRONG TREE? Prof. B. M. Hegde, hegdebm@gmail.com “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”   Abraham Lincoln What worries me is the news item that when the doctors in Israel went on strike in March 2000, death rate fell significantly in Jerusalem city, while it did not change in the coastal city if Netanya, where doctors worked as usual.  Even when compared to the month of March in 1999 and 1998 the fall in death rate in 2000 was noteworthy. Similar trend was reported from Los Angeles County in the 1970s and, possibly, also in Canada and Bogota in Columbia a few years ago. Even in the field of drug trials small studies seem to give striking benefit but under further investigations they “do not deliver the degree of benefit initially touted by their clinical champions and marketers. All is not well in our thinking in this area. While the life e...

Bribe of Rs: 265/- took 30 years in courts New Delhi : The Supreme Court has expressed displeasure over a case of a petty crime where a Delhi employee taking the bribe of Rs 265 continued lingering on for almost three decades and still contesting at the age of 76. It slashed his sentence of imprisonment to three months already undergone, but imposed a fine of Rs 50,000. He was trapped by the CBI in 1984 for demanding money from a contractor. The Bench of Justices Sudhansu Mukhopadhaya and Kurien Joseph regretted the slow justice on the offence of  the accused V K Verma, who is now 76 years old, is ill. “The accused has already undergone physical incarceration for three months and mental incarceration for about thirty years. Whether at this age and stage, it would not be economically wasteful, and a liability to the State to keep the appellant in prison, is the question we have to address. Having given thoughtful consideration to all the aspects of the matter, we are of the...

Gunmen kill polio workers Karachi/Islamabad: Four anti-polio workers, including two women, were killed in attacks in different parts of Pakistan on people engaged in a vaccination campaign against the crippling disease, reports PTI. In Karachi, two woman workers and a man were killed and two others injured when unidentified gunmen fired at them in Qayummabad area. The team was working without any security. Four armed men were waiting in the area and attacked the team as soon as it entered the neighbourhood. Unidentified men opened fire at a vaccination team at Mansehra in the country’s restive northwest and killed one worker, The Express Tribune reported. In Balochistan province, unidentified persons snatched a car from a vaccination team. The attacks came a day after health authorities in Karachi, launched a drive to inoculate 7.6 million children as part campaign against polio.  Nuclear plants unstable: Engineer Tanaka Tokyo: A Japanese engineer, who helped build cripple...

Tokyo thief caught with 450 pairs of high heels Tokyo: A man arrested for stealing high-heel shoes from a Tokyo hostess club was found to have a total of 450 purloined pairs when his room was searched, Japanese police said. “I’ve felt pleasure in stealing high heels. I was not interested in brand-new products,” Sho Sato, 28, told investigators after he was arrested, according to Tokyo police. Sato, who is jobless and has no fixed residence, broke into the changing room of the hostess club in Tokyo’s glitzy Ginza district last November and stole 14 pairs of high heels and cosmetics, police said. They later confiscated some 450 pairs of high heels from a room he rented but the owners have yet to be identified. “The lockers at the club’s changing room were a treasure chest,” Sato was quoted as telling police.   When shit exploded A woman was badly burnt in a freak accident after a toilet in a bar in Barcelona exploded while she was using it, reports PTI from London. The w...

INDIA & JAPAN:  MADE FOR EACH OTHER? Dr. M. V. Kamath India has always been friendly towards Japan. It has been visited by such notable Indians as Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda. True, it had imperial ambitions as did Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium but those were such days when Tokyo felt it could take a leaf from European books. It attacked China when it was ruled by warlords and there was hardly any central authority worth the name. A weak China, like a weak India attracted outside forces. During the second world war,  Japanese forces came close to the north east provinces but it must be remembered that behind those forces was the Indian National Army headed by Subhas Chandra Bose. Then, following the defeat of Japan by Allied Forces and International Military Tribunal brought General Hideki Tojo on trial, it was an Indian judge on the panel, Radhabinod Pal who stood by Japan – a fact that Japan has never forgotten. The Japanese now want ...