India at Rio: 2016 Olympics

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2016 Olympics, Abhinav Bindra, Aditi Ashok, Dipa Karmakar, Jitu Rai, P V Sindhu, Rio Olympics, Rohan Bopanna, Saina Nehwal, Sakshi Malik, Sania Mirza

The 2016 Summer Olympics at Rio de Janeiro came to a spectacular end recently. India had sent its biggest squad till date, of 119 athletes and sportsmen. We were widely expected to do much better than our performance at the last Olympic Games at London in 2012. You may recall that we had won 6 medals then, 2 silver and 4 bronze medals. Our Silver winners were Sushil Kumar in wrestling and Vijay Kumar in shooting, with Bronze medals being won by Gagan Narang in shooting, Mary Kom in boxing, Saina Nehwal in badminton, and Yogeshwar Dutt in wrestling. 

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Do We Indians Protect Law Breakers?

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Akrama Sakrama Scheme, culture, India, Kashmir Valley, law breakers, Rajya Sabha, stone pelters

Do we Indians as a race favour the underdog so much that our sympathies lie with law breakers? Also, with those who would not have suffered had they followed the laws in the first place? Is it part of our cultural ethos that we push as much as we can until rebuffed, and then complain about injustice meted out to us? I have examples from the macro to the micro, so this set me thinking.

A Phenomenon Called Rajinikanth

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Kabali, Rajinikanth, Rajinikanth jokes, super star

When a son, Shivaji Rao Gaekwad , the third in the family was born to Police Constable Ramoji Rao Gaekwad and his wife Ramabai in Bangalore on December 12, 1950, they had no idea that he would one day become one of the biggest super stars of Indian cinema. Likewise, those who bought tickets from him when he was a bus conductor in Route 10 A of the Bangalore Transport Service would not have dreamt that one day he would rule the silver screen. They still talk about those days when Rajinikanth (as he later became known as) impressed them so much with his antics that people traveled by his bus routes just to see him perform his duties as a conductor with extraordinary flair and style. 

Dr. Raghuram Rajan

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Dr Raghuram Rajan, Indian Economy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, RBI Governor

Dr. Raghuram Rajan is, I believe, a modest man. Recently, he must have been embarrassed to be in the  eye of a storm after he announced that he is not open for a second term as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). When he assumed office, aged 50, he was so refreshingly different from earlier Governors that some in India went so far as to compare the former Chief Economist of the IMF, and Professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business with James Bond!

International Yoga Day

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International Yoga Day, Prime Minister Modi, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, The Art of Living Foundation, Yoga

For the uninitiated, yoga looks so complex. I can imagine my favorite author P G Wodehouse describing it as people tying themselves in knots. Yet kids are taking to it just as their elders. Black, white, brown or any color in between, in nearly 200 countries, big and small, people are taking to what might be, at least in India for sure, the most inexpensive way to managing good health. They are practicing it with vigor and unprecedented enthusiasm from San Francisco, Ca touching the Pacific Ocean,  across the US mainland, Europe, Africa, and Asia to Yokohama in Japan on the other side of the Pacific.  From the capitalist United States to communist China, yoga is taking the world by storm. 

So Near Yet So Far, Royal Challengers Bangalore in IPL 2016

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AB de Villiers, Chris Gayle, IPL9, Royal Challengers Bangalore, Shane Watson, Sunrisers Hyderabad, Virat Kohli, Yuzi Chahal

When Shane Watson fell at 164 in the 16th over, a silence fell upon the 30,000 odd people who thronged the Chinnaswamy Stadium at Bengaluru that day. Could the tail for the Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) score 44 in the last 3 overs? Hyderabad had scored over 50 in their last three overs but we didn’t have their fire power. At one stage it had seemed that even 208 the target set by the Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) could be chased down. Now it appeared inevitable that RCB would fail in their bid to win the coveted Indian Premier League (IPL). It was not to be third time lucky for them having lost earlier finals in 2009 and 2011.

Namma Bengaluru – The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

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Bengaluru, IIM-Bangalore, Indian Institute of Science, PUC examinations, traffic accidents

Everything in the world is relative. This summer has been hotter than ever before, or so it seems to us. We often reflect on how Bengaluru famed for its wonderful climate could have become like this. Yet, see the faces of those who deplane at Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport and you will find most have broad smiles when they realize how much better Bengaluru is compared to wherever they came from. Same is the case at the City Railway Station. Namma Bengaluru may be bad in some aspects but it is far better than most cities in India in many other aspects.

There’s More To India Than JNU!

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JNU, Kanhaiya Kumar, National Highways, Nitin Gadkari, Piyush Goyal, rural electrification

The TV channels and the print media of late have been full of Kanhaiya Kumar of JNU and all that happened in the campus starting with the Poetry Reading event for which permission was sought by Umar Khalid, who is now in jail. My only question to Kanhaiya Kumar and the other office bearers of the JNU Students Union is: even if you did not raise the anti national slogans yourself, what did you do to stop them? Surely, you were more popular on campus than those so-called “outsiders”. How come they hijacked the poetry reading contest? Here’s what the JNU authorities have had to say about the incident on February 9, 2016 that triggered everything that followed.

The NDA Govt Has Done More Than Just Be “Intolerant”

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Indian Railways, intolerance, National Commission for Minorities, NDA Government, PM Narendra Modi, Power Sector in India, rural electrification

Many people in India, like me, are fed up with the barrage of media coverage in 2015 on the “intolerance” perceived by some. I can write reams about this subject but now it has become old and stale. Suffice it to say that those who didn’t protest for worse tragedies in the past ( read: Sikhs massacre of ’84, many communal riots under the Congress Govt, the forced exodus of Kashmiri Pandits etc) thought it fit to return their awards and generally paint a terrible picture of India, which the country didn’t deserve. I believe much of the flak that followed was based on perceptions not backed by concrete data.

OROP or One Rank One Pension

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Defence Services, Indian Army, OROP, pensions

One of the issues that has caught the attention of the nation is that of One Rank One Pension (OROP). It was appalling to see the protesting veterans being shoved around by the Delhi Police a day before Independence Day. The reason stated was that Jantar Mantar had to be “sanitized” before the I Day celebrations as done every year. This made no sense to many who were affronted that those who secure our borders could even be thought of as security risks. I wasn’t. There can be infiltrators to a mass movement. Remember the “veteran” in Frederick Forsyth’s “The Day of the Jackal”?