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The governmentâs concern at the circulation of patently false news items is quite understandable as there is a noticeable rise in the visibility of such items circulating on the social media. In fact, 2023 is the tenth year since this new weapon was added to the arsenal of Indiaâs major political parties. These items stir up emotions, for or against the regime, and whip up rage at perceived attacks and insults on oneâs religion. There are clear reasons to assume that several hordes of people or teams must be working overtime to disseminate them in order to raise the temperature in peopleâs minds with these distortions of the truth.
1. Three fourth of the worldâs greenhouse gas emissions result from burning of fossil fuels for energy and everyone agrees that the world must rid itself of these fossil fuels that endanger human and other forms of life. Half a century ago, we were told to produce energy at any cost, but in this century, the mission is to move to cleaner renewable energy resources. The important question now is by when will we be able to use only or mainly renewable resources for energy generation. By we, I refer to both India and the world, but in this talk we shall restrict ourselves only to India.
There are reasons to believe that some 12 lakh crore rupees have been systematically siphoned off from banks in the first 8 years of Narendra Modiâs rule â mainly by big corporate borrowers,. This was/is done quite âlegitimatelyâ by taking loans for units and then getting them written off as unrecoverable non-performing assets (NPAs) The scale of that is 4 to 6 times higher than the internationally accepted norm. Obviously such a massive but smooth operation is simply not possible without complete political backing. Every GM, ED or CMD of a bank knows that when he is told by someone representing the core of political power âto lend to Xâ, he jolly well does it.
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They are caught playing around with the time-tested established principles and procedures of good and fair governance.
In a democracy, public affairs are no oneâs personal fiefdom, though those in power often get their way in, say, getting someone into a position. But even here, the rules of eligibility must permit or be stretched to cover the executiveâs will, or be vague enough not to stand in the way.
When Prime Minister Modi addressed a highly publicised meeting in Bali recently and remembered ever so fondly that Indians from Odisha had gone to Bali several centuries ago to spread âIndian civilisationâ, he was actually admitting more than he meant.
Two recent news stories about Ram from two extremes of India, Ayodhya and Ram Setu, would have caught oneâs attention. Where Ayodhya is concerned, the Pandoraâs box had actually been opened long ago, in December 1949, when KKK Nair, the not-so-secular district magistrate of Faizabad, facilitated the sudden âappearanceâ of Ram-Sita images inside Babri Masjid.
Among regional festivals that have been most widely publicised by Bollywood, Karva Chauth takes the pride of place â along with Mumbaiâs Ganesh Festival. But while Ganesh is a pan-Indian Hindu deity, most would never have known the quaint one-day festival called Karva Chauth â had it not been for Hindi cinema.
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Today is Lakshmi Puja in Bengal and the East comprising of Assam, Odisha and Tripura. It is popularly known as the Kojagori Purnima and the East insists on invoking Lakshmi on the full moon day of the lunar month of Ashwin, while the North and West worship Lakshmi Puja a little later, on the darkest moon night, Amavasya, as Diwali.
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Aldous Huxley was among the first to brand Gandhi and his movements `anti- scienceâ. âTolstoyanâs and Gandhiites tell us to `return to natureâ,â he said, âin other words, abandon science altogether and live like primitivesâ. This impression was surely in currency and, in the absence of a determined, evidence laden rebuttal, it continues to prevail. Dr Meghnad Saha once told the Russians that he and his fellow scientists had âas little regardâ for Gandhiâs economic and social theories âas you âthe Russiansâ have for Tolstoyâ.
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Narendra Modi is not all oratory or glory with trumpets â he has a long track record of boasting and bungling, and sometimes just disregarding rules and conventions as well.
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When I first met Shivendra Singh Dungarpur in 2014, he had just started his Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) in Mumbai. I was then the Chief Executive Officer of Prasar Bharati in Delhi and he wanted archivists from Doordarshan to join his proposed workshop on restoration and preservation of films and audio visual materials. He had captioned it as the âfirst Film Preservation and Restoration School Indiaâ which was to be held in February 2015.
Sri Aurobindo, the venerable sage of French Pondicherry, turned 75 on the very day British India â which he had quit after leading its first revolutionary war of liberation â attained Independence. The sheer coincidence was not lost then, though it is almost completely forgotten today, on the 150th anniversary of his birth.
On the 14th of August, 1947, Pakistan broke free from the erstwhile united India and that very night, India declared freedom. Amidst the euphoria and waves of support were doubts, doomsayers and opponents. This new India was not one entity but consisted of 14 British provinces and 565 princely states, with a mind boggling multiplicity of cultural identities, languages and ethnicities. Many were reminded of John Stracheyâs jibe that âthere is not and never was an IndiaâĻno India nation, no people of India.â
As fire and protests rage across the country, one is reminded of the utter lawlessness that Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, the three classical political philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries had referred to as the 'state of nature'. Things are not yet so bad, thankfully so, in spite of scenes of thousands of the unemployed young torching millions' worth of public property. They are up against the new Agnipath scheme that seeks to recruit some 45,000 short-time 'soldiers' into the army on a contractual basis. Modi's India has not seen such a worrisome breakdown of law and order, one that is so expressly violent and widespread in so many states.