RESEARCH

How Arvind Kejriwal, Kiran Bedi and Co took the unassuming people of this country for a ride [ Click on the headline to hear Shambhu Dutt Sharma speak ] T he 5-8 April spectacle at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, was nothing but a corporate conspiracy of expending the energies of the Great Indian Huddle-and-Muddle Class, as mass mobilisation by Baba Ramdev and satyagraha by veteran Gandhian Shambhu Dutt Sharma was making them increasingly jittery. The unfolding of the events also suggests, at least in hindsight and going by the confessions of a drunk journalist, that the UPA Government was complicit in the act of trickery. When the pressure was building up : Baba Ramdev addressing a rally at Ramlila Maidan on 27 February 2011; the group went on to submit a memorandum containing 10 demands to the President To grab maximum eyeballs, the show was timed conveniently to fall between the end of the ICC World Cup tournament and the beginning of DLF-sponsored Indian Premier Leag...

... India and the Games' apologists blame the victim — Indians — for not being nationalistic enough A n international games event is often hosted in a place with the aim to uplift the local economy. The Commonwealth Games has so far served this purpose well in several cities in various countries that hosted them (this event is strictly associated with the hosting city and not the hosting country). Prime among these examples is the 2002 chapter that was held in Manchester that was passing through its worst phase of unemployment, a fallout of the closure of hundreds of textile mills the city has historically been known for. The city received a considerable facelift as a result, and at least 20,000 jobs were created as a direct result of the infrastructure upgrade. The most prominent of the economic changes observed by the city because of the 2002 Commonwealth Games was Microsoft, the company that took charge of the cyber support for the event, making the city its European headquarter...

_______________ Surajit Dasgupta _______________ Can Challenge 2009 find the missing notes? N a jAnE koI kaisI hai yeh zindagAnI ,’ sang Debojit Dutta from Kolkata so marvellously — albeit he was out of breath once, a point conveniently ignored by the judges — last night that the audience, going a step ahead of whistling hysterically, gave him a standing ovation to mark the end of the first episode of “Sa Re Ga Ma Pa – Challenge 2009”. The rendition of the rock song from the film, Gangster , was so enthralling that, much as I conceived this article last night when the programme was being aired, I can’t recall the names of other singers now. That does not mean, however, that the other contestants did not sing well. They did. And the judges — Himesh Reshammiya, Aadesh Srivastava, Shankar Mahadevan and Preetam — boasted ad nauseam , though not unjustifiably, how the contest was many notches above the competing, me-too programmes on other channels. That was the happy part. The causes ...

Screaming headlines declaring India's first 'swine flu' death followed by measured editorials advising people level-headedness, or the sight of people moving about masked followed by pacifying messages from doctors days later. Honey-I-Blew-Up-The-Kid has been the story of media's information management on the potential H1N1 worldwide pandemic, which in India is still merely an outbreak W hen I left Frankfurt, Germany, I got on a deadly 747, and I am gonna go home on a deadly 747 and connect in Chicago, which happens to be a deadly airport, to get back to deadly Atlanta..." Daniel C Rutz, Global Health Communications Team Leader of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was reacting to the opening sentence of a report that had appeared in The Times of India , which said, "The deadly H1N1 swine flu virus continues to spread across school students in Delhi..." Another report that had appeared in Mail Today found the "government in a tizz...