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

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

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

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

While travelling in a taxi in Mumbai, I broached the hot topic of discussion these days, ‘Modi as BJP’s prime ministerial face’. The taxi driver seemed a bit unsure about its overall outcome on BJP’s fortunes but was sure about his own vote going to Modi. 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