NIIRA RADIA — owner of PR company Vaishnavi Communications, among others — is not merely a fixer in the old sense of the word. She is a thermometer reading for a very ill society. In April this year, a clutch of mysterious documents had made their way to several media houses. At face value the documents seemed a synopsis of phone conversations between Niira — a powerful lobbyist for Mukesh...

Sonia Gandhi visited a farmer widow's house in August 2004, soon after the UPA came to power. However, this visit did not bring as much change in her life as Rahul Gandhi's visit on July 18, 2008, to Kalawati's house. In fact, the damaged canal that led to the suicide by Ranjana Deshmukh's husband has still not been repaired. The struggles of Kalawati of Yavatmal and Ranjana Deshmukh of Wardha, both...

Fifty thousand jobs? The U.S. economy has lost that many every week, on average, for a straight 140 weeks since December 2007. Now that the media's gush and drool over the Obama visit has run dry — thanks to other far more interesting events — it might be worth looking at a couple of ‘outcomes' that much of our media seemed pretty taken with.‘Twenty deals worth 10 billion dollars that create...

Time magazine picked him as one of 100 people shaping our world. Today, he’s held responsible for bringing an exciting, inspirational business into disrepute. Oh, and his wife says he beat her and snatched their son. There could not be a more controversial torchbearer than Vikram Akula for an industry as quintessentially Indian as microfinance, the business of providing the poor with loans, as small as R5,000, secured not with...

Special healthcare awaits children of Jharkhand. Under National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), a check-up drive for students of state-run government schools will be launched from Thursday with the hope of reaching out to about 45 lakh children aged between five and 10. According to Aradhana Patnaik, state director, NRHM, the children will be issued health cards giving them access to regular check-ups every six months and free medical treatment depending on their...