Indian statesmanship’s debt to doctor-turned-diplomats
K.P. Nayar
A little-known brotherhood within the Indian Foreign Service is that of medical graduates who successfully wrote the civil services examination and opted to represent India abroad. When young men and women, who graduated from medical colleges, initially appeared for interviews at the Union Public Service Commission, they invited a mixture of dismay and disapproval from the panel that after studying for five years in most cases to practise medicine and having used up ... Read More

India, Japan draw closer, with an eye on China
by Rama Lakshmi and Chico Harlan

NEW DELHI — During a three-day visit to Japan this week, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed several major infrastructure and defense-technology deals, and agreed to speed up dialogue on nuclear cooperation and conduct more joint naval exercises. His host, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, called Singh a “mentorlike leader.”

But the bonhomie appeared calculated, at least in part, to send a not-so-subtle diplomatic message to Beijing in the wake of ... Read More

Income Generation And Charities
By Father Anand Muttungal
The income generation and charity are the two words that are central to all religions and voluntary organizations. The concept of charity is found in the Jewish teachings "Tzedakah" is the Hebrew word used for "charity" in English. The word charity is giving aid, assistance and money to the poor and needy or to other worthy causes. However, the nature of tzedakah is very different from the idea of charity. ‘The word ... Read More

In India, the Tragic Dilemma of 'Doll'
By PAUL BECKETT and KRISHNA POKHAREL

In Hindi, gudiya means "doll." It was the nickname of a tiny 14-year-old girl with a light complexion, long black hair and a round face. She was given the name by the people who sent her to have paid sex with men in neighborhoods on the fringes of South Delhi over five months, starting two years ago.

Since last December, when a 23-year-old New Delhi student died after being gang-raped on ... Read More

Fruits of Arctic success await Khurshid
K.P. NAYAR
Washington, June 10: External affairs minister Salman Khurshid will have an opportunity this week to savour the fruits of a diplomatic victory for the country of the kind which has become rare amidst the cacophony of Beijing getting the better of New Delhi everywhere or the US allegedly following a policy of benign neglect towards India.

When Khurshid visits Himadri during a bilateral trip to Norway, it will be the vindication of a five-year visionary ... Read More

Can Pakistan Make Peace Next Door?
By AHMED RASHID

LAHORE, Pakistan — IN the spring of 1992, as the Communist government in Afghanistan started imploding after the collapse of the Soviet Union, seven Afghan mujahedeen leaders, pumped full of C.I.A. money, gathered in Peshawar, Pakistan, to discuss how to take over Afghanistan and share power peacefully.
The man who brought them together and patiently sat with them wasNawaz Sharif, then only 43 and in his first term as Pakistan’s prime minister. A simple ... Read More

Delhi varsity's Journalism Entrance Test cancelled
Delhi University's 4-year UP to help students with practical skills

An entrance test for the Delhi University's journalism course has been cancelled after the Journalism (honours) course has been replaced by the four year undergraduate programme (FYUP). With a revised syllabus, the new course has been named as "Bachelors of Journalism and Mass Communication (BJMC)".

It may be noted that five colleges of Delhi University has been conducting a combined journalism entrance test (CJET) for admission ... Read More

Obama lesson on how to handle Pak
K.P. NAYAR

Washington: Days before Pakistan is to get a new Prime Minister in a potentially promising transfer of power for South Asia, Presiden Barack Obama has offered a lesson on how to handle a country which continues to be one of America’s indispensable allies.

The lesson ought to be valuable for New Delhi as it stumbles from one policy disaster to another in its backyard where diplomatic equations are crucial, in Sri Lanka and in ... Read More

The New Silk Road Generation: Introducing a Homegrown Narrative for Peace in Afghanistan
Cy Thannikary

It is Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war”. Erasing Borders and its over 3,000 supporters of professionals around the world are convinced, educating the Afghanistan youth is the best way to bring sustainable peace and security in that part of the world. Considering the fact that over 60% of the entire population of Afghanistan’s is under 20 years old, providing better education ... Read More

Mortgage Jobs Sent to India by U.S. Banks
By JOEL SCHECTMAN

NEW DELHI—As U.S. banks struggle to maintain margins amid growing regulatory demands, some of them have started to outsource part of the onerous work involved in servicing mortgages and processing foreclosures to India's major technology companies.

The Wall Street JournalThe move is creating a new revenue stream for such Indian outsourcing firms as Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. 532540.BY +1.07%and Wipro Ltd. 507685.BY -0.04% at a time when many Western companies have been pulling back ... Read More

A HEADY VOTE IN PAKISTAN
BY BASHARAT PEER

I traveled through Pakistan for two weeks in late February and early March—a time of particular violence in a country that has suffered much of it in the recent past, in which a common thread in conversations was fear about the forthcoming national vote. “It is going to be a violent election,” a magazine editor told me. And many others echoed him, citing Taliban threats to attack a process they deemed un-Islamic and ... Read More

The Travails of Pakistan’s Sharif
Melkulangara BHADRAKUMAR

Following the initial sense of jubilation over the magnificent victory of Pakistan Muslim League led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif in last week’s parliamentary poll, the inevitable reality check is about to commence. A mixed picture is bound to emerge.

On the face of it, Sharif’s party secured 126 seats out of the 273, which were up for grabs in the poll. This is a most impressive tally and by far exceeds the ... Read More

The Silence of the Shams
By HARTOSH SINGH BAL

A woman in Baruipur village, south of Kolkata, with her investment certificate from the Saradha group.Piyal
NEW DELHI — Ten suicides, one murder, $5.5 billion in losses and more than 1,300 journalists without a job — the toll from one of India’s biggest Ponzi schemes continues to mount.

The Saradha group robbed thousands of poor Indians in the state of West Bengal to make a handful of people very rich. According to the ... Read More

Hindustan Times appoints South African journalist chief editorial officer
Prashant Jha

Hindustan Times has appointed Nicholas Dawes, editor-in-chief of Mail and Guardian (M&G), a leading South African paper, its new Chief Editorial and Content Officer.

In a mail to his colleagues in M&G on Friday, Mr. Dawes said, “I have been offered a remarkable opportunity to help lead a process of change and growth at Hindustan Times.”

Responding to queries on the social media, he tweeted, “The HT role is a compelling challenge in one of the ... Read More

Sri Lanka’s victory over terrorism – why should Sri Lanka apologize?
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam of LTTE had its ground militant force vanquished by the armed forces of Sri Lanka on 19th May 2009 after several appeals made by the Sri Lankan President to lay down their arms and surrender were ignored. Close to 12,000 LTTE fighters gave themselves in of which 594 were child soldiers and the Sri Lankan military ended up sacrificing close to 6000 military lives to save 294,000 Tamil civilians ... Read More

Pak leadership change always bad news for India
So there’s another change of leadership in Pakistan. For some, there is a newfound optimism with the way the next Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has been making overtures to India. Of course, one still has to be wary of India’s arch enemy.

Things have gone wrong for India right from the very moment Pakistan was born. Liaquat Ali Khan was the first Prime Minister and under him were sown the seeds of discord in Kashmir, a ... Read More

Defiant Pakistani women vote in record numbers
Women have voted in record numbers in Pakistan’s general election this year. In many parts of the country they have done so in defiance of familial tradition, political party orders, and the very real threat of Taliban violence.
The line, under the hot summer sun, is slow-moving, but good-natured.

Elections are rare here, and the process unfamiliar to most, so the line barely creaks forward, but no-one seems to mind.

The women wait patiently, ID cards in hand, ... Read More

Daring Confession of Indian Spy Surjeet Singh
By Zaheerul Hassan

ARE ISI & RAW HEADS ONE IN CONTROLLING CROWD OF PAKISTAN AND INDIA IN CONNIVANCE WITH THE RULERS MATTER?

By Balbir Singh Sooch-Sikh Vichar Manch

Are ISI ( Inter Services Intelligence. Intelligence agency of Pakistan) & RAW ( Research and Analysis Wing (Intelligence wing of Indian army)) Must Be Having Knowledge As To Who Is Journalist Manjit Singh Rattu?

For Example A Sikh Tragedy: Respected Kiranjot Kaur ji is a granddaughter of Master Tara Singh, who ... Read More

The trail of friction between India and its neighbours
K.P. Nayar

For once it is possible to empathize with Manmohan Singh’s determination to chip away at the resistance to a rapprochement with Pakistan. With caveats though. The attack on a Pakistani prisoner in Kot Bhalwal jail in Jammu has robbed India of the moral superiority it enjoyed not only in its engagement with Pakistan but also in the perception of the international community on dealings between New Delhi and Islamabad. It is fairly evident what ... Read More

Bangladesh’s Race to Save Shaheena
By JIM YARDLEY

SAVAR, Bangladesh — The rescuers discovered her by a faint, distant sound. They had spent four days crawling through the wreckage of Rana Plaza, tons of concrete and steel pressing down, saving hundreds of people. Now only the dead remained. Except for a lone woman, a garment worker.

She was trapped behind a fallen pillar, in a suffocating crevice maybe two feet high. First, the rescuers could see only her fingertips pressing through a ... Read More

Why is General Kiyani dictating Islamic ideology as the basis of the country?
Baseer Naveed

The General should be prosecuted for betraying his oath as a member of the Armed Forces

Just twenty days before the general elections the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, has come out with a policy statement which gives the political views of the Army. The statement was delivered with the express intention of getting elections results in favour of the fundamentalists, Jihadis and their supporting parties. While addressing the assembled troops ... Read More

Mumbai: Please Call It Bombay
by Dilip D’Souza

The city might have a new name, but King George's colonial legacy is still everywhere. By Dilip D'Souza.
It’s just a nondescript shed. But if there’s a more telling descriptor of my city’s essence, of a certain schizophrenia that runs in the veins of some of us who call this place home, I have yet to find it. Tucked on a quiet lane between Elphinstone College and the National Gallery of Modern Art, ... Read More

The awareness of India in Israel is of a different kind now
K.P. NAYAR

Just when it appeared that India-Israel relations had hit a plateau, a trailblazing project is under way which has the potential to change the bilateral relationship from one that is still largely cloak-and-dagger and under-cover to one the two peoples can genuinely embrace.
When the documentary, Shalom Bollywood, by the Australian academic and filmmaker, Danny Ben-Moshe, is completed and released, hopefully later this year, it may well be possible to draw a parallel between ... Read More

US ignored tip-off on Boston ‘bomber’: Russia had warned
K.P. NAYAR

Washington, April 20: Dismissed in barely one paragraph by mainstream media outlets in the US is a big story that ought to rank along with dramatic accounts of the capture late last night of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old Chechen American who is suspected to have planted pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon.

This grossly understated story is a tale of how Russia had tipped off the Federal Bureau of Investigation two years ago that Dzhokhar’s ... Read More

Democracy's Far-Ranging Art
By Tom L. Freudenheim

The beautiful and carefully edited exhibition of modern art from India now at the Peabody Essex Museum reminds us that the global interaction we associate with that nation's economy has precedents in art. A focus on Indian artists' engagement with other art makes this show especially important. Selected from 1,200 works in the museum's Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection, the 70 paintings and works on paper by 23 artists track the fertile ... Read More

Indians Hope to Raise Journalism Standards
By GAYATRI RANGACHARI SHAH

MUMBAI — With more than 80,000 newspapers and magazines and 500 television news channels, India’s news media industry is among the world’s most vibrant. Journalists have no qualms taking the government to task, yet critics wonder whether, in the era of the 24/7 news cycle, professional standards are increasingly compromised.

The proliferation of news media outlets, combined with concerns about the quality of reporters, has resulted in a great demand for top journalism ... Read More

Growing Religious Intolerance in Pakistan
Xavier William

Humans are considered social animals, but have we ever been more human than social?
Lamenting growing intolerance in the society, it is painful that religious intolerance, bias, discrimination on ethnic background, terror and militancy and divisive thinking is alarmingly growing in Pakistani society.

Every society and its institutions are intolerant of some sort of behavior. Unqualified toleration is not only nonsensical; it is impossible and lethal. A society’s toleration can be either coercive or non-coercive. Since ... Read More

India would have had 175 million fewer poor people by 2008 had it embarked upon free-market reforms in 1971 instead of 1991.
By SADANAND DHUME

For the first time since the advent of economic reforms in 1991, a question mark looms over India's development prospects. Growth this year is less than half the tigerish high of 9.8% six years ago, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's reputation as a reformer lies in tatters. The government he heads has become synonymous with corruption scandals, reckless populism and policy torpor.
... Read More

A Gandhi's Bumbling, Befuddling `Beehive Speech'
The young Indian politician Rahul Gandhi, whose bloodline includes three former prime ministers, is widely expected to be his party's nominee for that post when elections are held in the first half of 2014. But even Gandhi's supporters within his Congress Party were frequently bemused by a speech he made to more than 1,000 prominent members of the Indian business community last week.

At a meeting organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry, the 42-year-old Gandhi ... Read More

Education is a lifelong process
Jaffna College Institute of Agriculture in Sri Lanka focuses on grass roots
potentials for development
A society that is nurtured from the cradle of its own assets, is set well on its path towards the ideal goals
of development, said Mrs Chitra Joseph, the head of the Jaffna College Institute of Agriculture in an
interview with the Morning Star.
“When the grass roots potentials are identified and their productive capabilities developed, a society’s
stability is ensured by steady and sustained growth”, ... Read More