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India’s electoral system, run by the Election Commission of India, is one of the world’s wonders. It was not too long ago (and in fact many of us can remember those days) when Bihar’s elections were associated with violence and booth capturing. A series of...

Politicians are loath to let a favourite babu go off into retirement. They find ways to bring them back into the administration. In 2017, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh had appointed retired chief secretary Suresh Kumar as his chief principal secretary even though the state...

Vegetable prices have gone through the roof. So much so, that an average middle-class consumer has been forced to cut down on his daily vegetable intake. Most people hesitate to visit markets. The price terror has come on top of vanishing jobs and truncated salaries...

When I was growing up in army cantonments, meat was on our table every day. It was taken for granted that military men ate meat because they were ‘real’ men. In my grandfather’s house all the women were vegetarian, but he had to have his...

Money is not everything but money makes all the difference in life. Word has come that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is tired of holding the heavy responsibility and would want to quit in a few months’ time. What he’s most upset with is that...

A nation in the neighbourhood has won praise from the International Monetary Fund, which tracks the GDP and other aspects of national economies worldwide apart from extending help to member nations in matters of financial stability. IMF statement, while releasing the Global Economic Outlook Report,...

In the season of Nobel Prize declarations, what arouses curiosity is of a Mathematics book studied by Amartya Sen, winner of Nobel in Economics in 1998. The official handle for Nobel Prize shared a picture of Lilavati, a treatise on Mathematics in Sanskrit written in...

The season of festivals is a season of joy. This year, Covid-19 pandemic is spreading a shadow over this season – a gloom for the first time in living memory. A total curb on these festivals is unimaginable but public activities will need to be...

Complex problems require many minds. Leadership is important but mostly in terms of directionality. The solutions need to be produced by those implementing, not the person directing. If this is reversed, progress will not be made and generally what results is retardation. For solutions to...

Fifteen years after the Right to Information (RTI) Act came into force, does the nation have more transparency or less? The story is quite sombre. More than 2.2 lakh cases are pending at the Central and State Information Commissions. Nine out of 29 information commissions...