Paying attention
Central university teachers are not satisfied with the new pay-scales announced by the government. They feel cheated because the government had more or less based its decision on the recommendations of the Rastogi committee and not the UGC, which had recommended a far better deal. In the end, the teachers have not even got what Rastogi had suggested.
More power to their elbow
The ordinance to set up within three months a Central Electricity Regulatory Commission and various State Electricity Regulatory Commissions to decide power tariffs sets the stage for overdue reforms whose absence has long stifled growth in the crucial power sector. It is public knowledge that the pathetic state of state electricity board (SEB) finances because of heavy subsidisation and poor collections is at the heart of this sector's languishing performance.
Confessions of a wave-maker
Thank God, in the elections to this Lok Sabha, I was not involved in making waves. But there was a time before my superannuation in 1981 when as an officer of the Government of India's much-misunderstood and consequently much-maligned Information Service, my principal responsibility was to make waves.
Intimations of immaturity
It is either inexperience or sheer hamhandedness. The Vajpayee government, not even 50 days old, is a picture of helplessness before the dictates of Jayalalitha. At every step, it gives the impression that it is not its own master. First the government was firm on Buta Singh. But then the Prime Minister's Political Adviser Pramod Mahajan brandished authority, to seek his resignation.
The Vajpayee mystique is plural
The American scholar Gerald Larson recently suggested that Indian secularism is the product of a hybrid cultural consciousness. A potpourri of ideas from the Brahminical to the Islamic to the colonial. Our prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, too is rooted in this hybrid culture.
Colonial burden
The story is more than a century old and could well go on for many. The controversy surrounding the Mullaperiyar dam shows no sign of fizzling out as both Tamil Nadu and Kerala refuse to sit together and talk it out.
