THANTIRAYANKUPPAM, INDIA — Five years ago, I woke up on a Sunday morning, checked the news online and saw that a tsunami had hit my part of the world. Early reports were sketchy. I read about just a few casualties (in Sri Lanka, as I recall), and I remember thinking that the whole thing sounded exciting. I went down to the beach, about a 15-minute drive from my house. I walked...

A Public Interest Litigation (PIL) can be filed in any High Court or directly in the Supreme Court. It is not necessary that the petitioner has suffered some injury of his own or has had personal grievance to litigate. The PIL is a right given to the socially conscious member or a public spirited NGO to espouse a public cause by seeking judicial means for redressal of public injury. Such...

Every time inflation hits the headlines, the political blame game begins. This time too, as food prices soar, everyone in the ruling coalition and the government is passing the buck. It is possible that there is no one guilty party and a combination of factors, involving several actors, is responsible for the current price spiral. Of all the proximate factors, the most important appears to be expectations. Each time prices...

This has been quite a decade for global corporate leaders, volatile not only in terms of their actual fortunes, but even more so with respect to the shifting perceptions of society. When the decade began, large corporations and those at their helm were at the peak of their power, flush with riches delivered by the dotcom boom in the US economy as well as the vast opportunities created by easier...

Well-known PR firms, professional designers, and ad agencies served the richer parties and candidates. They made up “news” items in the standard fonts and sizes of the desired newspapers and even “customised” the items to make them seem exclusive in different publications.  So you thought you’d had enough of Page 3? Newspapers in Maharashtra think otherwise. Some of them had more than one, on several days during the recent state...