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Lonely among allies
No one ever thought that the only difference between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Akali Dal, poll allies in Punjab, was over the candidature of Prime Minister IK Gujral in Jalandhar. The differences have always been so many and so deep that the alliance would have seemed unnatural enough to be improbable. And, the Akalis are not the only allies to clearly distance and demarcate themselves thus from the party-in-waiting, and on these issues in particular. Similar stances have been adopted by every new friend by whose association the BJP hopes to mark and strengthen its nation-wide presence.
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Afghans need help
Tens of thousands of homeless Afghans in the northern districts of Rustak and Tahkar desperately need outside assistance and are not getting it. On February 4, an earthquake of the magnitude of 6.1 razed a dozen villages and aftershocks have destroyed several more. The first international relief plane arrived a week later and a mule train carrying UN supplies is expected shortly.
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One more for the road
It is usual, on Indian streets awash with trendy cars and two-wheelers, to come across vehicles that can only be called junk. Three-wheeled autorickshaws; tempos; the `Vikrams' of Dehra Doon; Ambassador taxis over two decades old and so on. In Delhi, a lot of local cartage is done by three-wheeled cycle rickshaws and pushcarts. Are these modes of transportation `economical'?No way. The scarce resource in question is the road -- especially the urban road. These junk vehicles use this scarce resource inefficiently, and impose external costs on other road users. How?
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Fifty years of obduracy
The typewriters laying siege to Nuh's tehsil should've been warning enough. Four sat clanking noisily under the customary shanty; big, fat things as obsolete as hand-written editorial copy. Up close, all appeared bereft of their strategic key-thumbs, their markings long rubbed into oblivion. Their semi-literate masters now seem to rely entirely on their spinal cord's current dispensation to churn out any text at all. Here, seventy miles south of the capital, lay the perfect ode to fifty years of Indian obdurateness.
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Sri Lanka reflects on fifty years
A deeply divided Sri Lanka celebrated its 50th anniversary last week under the shadow of unprecedented security that ensured that it would not be a people's event. Except those invited to the event, everyone else was virtually under house arrest. Even as cynics were saying that it was hard to find any reason to mark the milestone with celebrations, President Chandrika Kumaratunga, in her anniversary speech, admitted that Sri Lanka had failed in the task of nation-building.
Run of the mill, bar one
At the time of writing this, the election campaign is in its last and intense stage. The manifestos are all out. The manifestos have comparatively more substance on political and socio-economic problems. Campaign speeches have focused on superficial, narrowly topical and polemical issues such as Bofors, accusations about communalism, the propriety of the two United Front governments being toppled, and so on. After going through all the manifestos, one is constrained to conclude that except for the BJP's the others are an exercise in repetition.
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