On Wednesday, the day UPA 11 was celebrating completion of four years, Uttar Pradesh was hosting two ambitious conferences. One was on skill development and community colleges, jointly hosted by the British High Commission and the state government, the other was entrepreneurs’ summit addressed by chief minister Akhilesh Yadav. Read more

I briefly met Bollywood star Salman Khan here in Lucknow. Initially he looked quite shy, unlike his celluloid image. As the guests in a crowded hall cheered him, girls offering him red roses, he stood tight-lipped. I prodded him to say something, even narrate some dialogue of his new film ‘Ek Tha Tiger’, for whose promotion he was visiting the city. Read more

It was 12 in the night and I was dead tired when I got a call from our family friend asking me to run a campaign in the newspaper to ‘Save Water’ during Holi festivities. I naively asked him, Why? He replied bluntly, “Perhaps we can’t send them water but we can certainly empathize with people dying of drought in Maharashtra.” I was touched. Read more

The day the Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi mooted a self-appraisal system for the state party leaders, I wondered what would be the parameters on which they would be judged. Read more

Who could have ever imagined that the biggest bulk order for computers across the globe would be made by one among the BIMARU states in the country? Read more

What’s going on in the country? A cop gets killed in Kunda, cops bash up a woman in Punjab even as a tiny girl gets raped in Delhi. The law and order situation has nose-dived and some states, including Uttar Pradesh, are notoriously in the lead. Read more

The UP bureaucracy couldn’t have asked for more. Having spent five years in a claustrophobic atmosphere under Mayawati, they finally got to breathe free on the historical La Martiniere grounds last Sunday. Read more

Before I comment on the politician’s ‘sojourn’ to the remote Khairar Sher Nagar village of Lance Naik Hemraj Singh in Mathura, let me make a suggestion hoping that someone from the Indian Army or the Central and the State Government is listening. Read more

It happened over a decade back. JD (U) leader Sharad Yadav was contesting the Lok Sabha elections from Budaun in Uttar Pradesh when I happen to meet him at a guest house there. Read more

We enter the New Year with an all-pervasive grief across the nation along with a strong resolve that we would not allow the sacrifice of India’s Braveheart to go waste. Never before tears were shed in every home of India for an unknown girl whose dreams were crushed by such a horrendous act. Read more