Professor Arjun Appadurai is a Mumbaikar at heart; coming to the city is an annual pilgrimage for this internationa­lly renowned cultural theorist and anthropologist. Appadurai, 62, who studied in Mumbai’s Elphinstone College, is currently Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He has been consultant and advisor to a wide range of public and private foundations such as The Smithsonian. In his seminal work Disjuncture and...

It’s not just the NCTC — we need to provide a statutory basis and oversight mechanisms for all our intelligence agencies   The protest by eight chief ministers, characterising the Union government’s decision to give powers of search and arrest to the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC ) under Section 43 (a) of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act 1967 as an assault on federalism, comes in the wake of a “sticky bomb”...

-The Economic Times It is a matter of great regret that West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee's conduct has converted one incident of rape into a series of offences against human dignity and propriety. The rape took place on February 6, a woman being gang-raped inside a car at gunpoint. She had trouble registering a case. When the police finally obliged, chief minister Mamata Banerjee called it a fabricated case, a political...

The government's zero transparency enabled Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority (NSRA) Bill has got thumbs down from a Parliamentary standing committee. The Atomic Energy Department had introduced NSRA Bill for setting up independent nuclear safety watchdog in Parliament last year with specific clauses limiting the applicability of the Right To Information (RTI) Act, the government's first such move. The bill propose to incorporate additional proviso in section 8 --- listing exempted clauses ---...

Dispelling the general perception that the CPI(Maoist), the left wing extremist outfit, is opposed to all industrial projects, Odisha-based top red leader Sabyasachi Panda said going all out against industries would shatter the livelihood of labourers. The secretary of the Odisha organising committee of CPI(Maoist) clarified this while speaking to a select group of journalists at an undisclosed location in Kandhamal district, about 250 km from here, on Thursday evening. “Communism always...