The FDI in retail debate has apparently fully traversed the realm of reason and for it seems to have degenerated into name-calling. I had intimation of this when a diplomat who meets me from time to time asked me if I was being put up, for a price, by Indian corporate interests to stymie the entry of the big western firms like Wal-Mart and Carrefour? I can well imagine the...

Declaring that the “Supreme Court will remain the Supreme Court, and cannot be converted into Parliament”, a three-judge Bench led by Chief Justice of India S H Kapadia today refused to “prematurely” intervene in the setting up of an independent regulator to monitor safety of nuclear plants, saying it was a policy decision, with a Bill already pending in the House. Efforts by advocate Prashant Bhushan, a Team Anna member, to...

Plutarch's Life of Dion contains an interesting anecdote of Dionysius, an avowed and established tyrant, killing his captain, Marsyas. Marsyas had dreamt of cutting Dionysius's throat, and Dionysius killed Marsyas on account of his dream. He based his decision on the assumption that Marsyas would not have dreamt of such a thing by night if he had not thought of it by day. In his seminal work The Spirit of Laws...

October 9 was a Sunday. An unusual day to call an emergency meeting of Delhi University's academic council. The main agenda was fairly routine stuff: approval of certain courses. However, tucked away as supplementary agenda was a proposal to do away with A K Ramanujan's essay, 'Three Hundred Ramayanas' from the history course - a proposal that was passed, triggering one of the fiercest debates in recent times in the academic...

Thirty-four-year-old Praseetha Dineshan from Kattipara panchayat in Kozhikode used to work as a postwoman delivering letters from 8 am to 5.30 pm. No longer.  After completing a training course of Coconut Development Board (CDB) for climbing coconut tree using a machine, she has now quit her temporary job and is happy to climb coconut trees to pluck coconuts. "Yesterday I climbed 15 trees and today I did 20. More and more people...