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Politics Business Expressions General Sports Leisure States 20 January 1998   The Mahatma would agree The recent staging of Mahatma vs Gandhi is commendable because it looks at a human side of Gandhi that has gone largely unseen. Gandhi would have welcomed the play's judgment of him as an insensitive father and unfeeling husband because he subjected his own life to relentless self-examination.   Will the real BJP stand up? Until the other day it was easy to understand the Bharatiya Janata Party. It projected itself through the discourse of Hindutva and all that the word connoted. One did not like it. But one knew where the party stood and what it represented. Why voting is not good for India When Deepak Lal, author of Against Dirigisme, coined the expression "predatory state", Mancur Olson raised a serious objection: not even an autocracy can be thus. Earthlings alone in the galaxy? Are we alone? Is intelligent life possible elsewhere? No matter what the America's National Aeronautical Space Agency (NASA) wants the world to believe, British scientist Arnold Wolfendale is quite convinced about the uniqueness of human beings and life on earth.   Subs for sea power The new submarine INS Sindhurakshak commissioned into the Indian Navy last month in Russia further strengthens Indo-Russian defence cooperation. The Sindhurakshak is an EKM 877-kilo class submarine built by the Russian Rubin Design Bureau and becomes the fifth of its kind in the Indian submarine fleet. When will it fly? The Tata airline project should hold the record for the sheer range of government bad behaviour it has single-handedly come to symbolise. To begin with, in unashamed thumbing of his nose at the notion of rule-based functioning, C M Ibrahim was allowed by two successive governments to play fast and loose with the Tata-Singapore Airlines joint-venture proposal.