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

The other day a colleague of mine in Tamil Nadu said, “Amma should become the Prime Minister of the country post 2014 general elections. She has the iron hand to set everything and everyone right in the country brimming with an irrepressible multitude of people and politicians.” 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

In somewhat a theatre of the absurd, the mercurial Mohd Azam Khan first fretted over his prolonged frisking at the Boston airport, then fumed at the External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid for manipulating his humiliation by the security officials at Logan airport and now his colleague and cabinet minister Shivpal Singh Yadav has dispatched a letter of sorts to the US President Obama to register the state government’s protest against the treatment meted out to Azam. Read more

I am at my wits end to understand why a man rapes a baby? Is it for sexual gratification? As I started browsing to find an answer, I laid my hands on a report published in The Telegraph which said, “The alleged rape of a nine-month-old baby girl by six men in a remote part of rural South Africa last week has focused the nation on an 80% rise in child sexual abuse over a year, much of it connected with the country’s AIDS pandemic. Read more

An English magazine has aptly described both Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi as ‘Corporate Leaders.’

As Modi hopped from one session to the other organised by India Inc (with Rahul making one appearance), I was really wondering who will decide the fate of their respective political party in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Read more

Once again I am in a dilemma over what to highlight first — the insensitivity of the woman cops who had shamelessly put behind bars a minor Dalit girl who had gone to the police station with her mother to lodge a complaint of sexual assault or the women achievers whom Hindustan Times had felicitated in Lucknow on Saturday for their grit and determination. Read more

It took Union minister Beni Prasad Verma full one year to come out of his hibernation, induced soon after the 2012 assembly elections in the state. We all know why. 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