By Ramesh Reddy / Hyderabad
According to informed sources, the central military commission naxalites leader Devji chetan is the man behind the Chhattisgarh ambush. The CPI Maoist militia network, the backbone of the Naxalites, as well as their intelligence wing played a crucial role in the Darbha Valley ambush in Sukuma district of Chhattisgarh in which 28 politicians, including Salwa Judum founder Mahendra Karma, Chhattisgarh PCC president Nandkumar Patel and his son Dinesh were killed.
By Upender Dikshit / Delhi
Ultimately, a solution to the country’s water management problems lies in creating fragmented water markets regulated at the level of various states.
It is not unusual for the monsoon to play truant in one part of India or the other every year. The country’s water situation is so precarious that even a normal monsoon, spread unevenly, creates drought-like conditions in some part of the country. Very often the scarcity of water spills over into the following year. Some years ago, it was the Bundelkhand in Uttar Pradesh that was starved for water; this year, the Marathwada region of Maharashtra is confronting an acute water scarcity.
By M H Ahssan / Hyderabad
The India Premier League (IPL) has lost its credibility. Cricket is turning into a game of spot-the-fixed moment. And with Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) president N. Srinivasan determined to stay put despite the muck reaching his doorstep, the board has proved itself to be a rogue entity accountable to nobody.
That Srinivisan still refuses to step down points to the moral bankruptcy of the nation’s richest sporting body. It also underscores the all-important question at the heart of the whole mess: how should cricket be run in this country?
By Siddhi Sharma / Mumbai
N Srinivasan has never been a pushover - his performance in Kolkata on Sunday afternoon was masterly, something he backs himself to pull off each time. And unlike Srinivasan, Sreesanth probably doesn't have the wherewithal to go anywhere but down from here.
Given a choice, and the chance, S Sreesanth would probably have gone to watch Any Body Can Dance and not The Great Gatsby last week. The film, Gatsby, was not a patch on the book - they never are, are they? - but Sreesanth, if he'd seen it, would have started at the (somewhat altered) line: "The loneliest moment in life is when you watch your whole world fall apart, and all you can do is stare blankly".
By M H Ahssan / Hyderabad
Despite Telugu Desam Party (TDP) chief N. Chandrababu Naidu’s claim that there is no power struggle in the family of party founder N.T. Rama Rao, the differences in the family once again came to fore on Tuesday. Popular Telugu actor and NTR’s grandson Junior NTR said he was not invited to ‘Mahanadu’ or annual convention of the party which began here Monday, while his father N. Harikrishna said he would speak about injustice being meted out to them at an appropriate time.
By Vivek Kaul / New Delhi
William S Pinckney, the chief executive officer of Amway India, was arrested yesterday by the crime branch of Kerala Police along with two other directors of the company.
A report in the Daily News and Analysis (DNA) quotes a top official of Economic Affairs Wing (EOW), Kerala as saying “With the call of easy money, they have been luring people to come and invest. And in turn, the new members had to get more people and this was leading to illegal money circulation. As a result, we had received several complaints against the company and we decided to arrest the officials.”
By Samuel Joseph / Bangalore
Actor, director and filmmaker, Shekhar Kapur, poses with a cigarette hanging between his lips, his hands busy working on something in the kitchen, while a model, playing his partner, has her mouth agape in awe for an advertisement in 1979, endorsing the Wills Filter cigarettes.
The advertisement carries a tag-line: “Made for each other,” referring not to the ‘couple’, but the tobacco and the filter.
Punctuating the then emerging advertising industry with significant presence, cigarette brands were prominent contributors since the 1960s, when varied advertisements and endorsements were allowed in public, given the absence of regulation.
By M H Ahssan / Hyderabad
Five decades ago, the special forces officer Roger Trinquier set about understanding why his nation losing to enemies it outgunned and outmanned. France, he wrote, was “in studying a type of warfare that no longer exists and that we shall never fight again, while we pay only passing attention to the war we lost in Indochina and the one we are about to lose in Algeria. The result of this shortcoming is that the army is not prepared to confront an adversary employing arms and methods the army itself ignores. It has, therefore, no chance of winning”.
