WTO is here to stay! India and farmers have to learn to make a success of WTO! WTO is a necessary good for the world agriculture. Without our agriculture or for that matter any country’s agriculture goods and services entering into the world trade the concerned agriculture goods and services won’t get the maximum prices….
Supreme Court judgment on Bihar Assembly dissolution
Critical political judgments await decisions Dr.Manmohan Singh was my Oxford contemporary. He was a research student and I was the undergraduate. Those who know the Oxford academic traditions know the distinction. Dr.Jagadish Bhagawathy was also a contemporary. Prof.Amartya Sen was at Trinity, Cambridge and in fact I knew Sen more intimately as my Santiniketan acquaintance….
Should we teach patriotism?
Rich schools, or schools, urban schools, rural schools Schools exist in isolation and what binds the Indian schools? What minmum programme for Indian schools? Regional and language chauvinism had destroyed an Indian identity in the youth .We need some loud thinking, identify the regional politicians who divided the Indian mind and injected the new divsions…
Poet Vallathol : M.K.K. Nayar
Thakazhi Shivasankara Pillai — Three visionaries I don’t know how the rest of India think of Kerala, the narrow strip of land at the West coast of South India and where some of India’s greatest minds had come from. Adi Shankara and Narayana Guru are the two most revered names. As for the rest of…
Time to review land reform laws
What is the impact on land reforms? Should the government take over agricultural land for industry promotion? In Karnataka now there is a raging controversy over the State government’s allotment of about nearly 1,000 acres of prime agricultural lands on the outskirts of Bangalore for the IT major, Infosys. Mr.Deve Gowda, the former Prime Minister,…
Fabian Socialism
What I learned from Harold Laski? He shaped my political beliefs in my younger days My another favourite writer and thinker was Harold J.Laski (1893-1949). I must have read and re-read almost all his volumes at one time. Now, as I read his biography (Harold Laski: Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman, 1993), I felt inspired…
Land reforms/ceiling laws/tenancy laws
What Planning Commission Dy. Chief says? Lots of informal business models are working in the landowner-tenancy relationships! Planning Commission Dy. Chief Mr.Ahluwalia suggestions on tenancy records seem very irrelevant and theoretical and even a casual remark! We need more vigorous, pragmatic working hands-on operational strategies for agriculture modernisation programmes. Mr.Ahuluwalia, a veteran economic expert. He…
What is history?
History is series of accidents Big events have no big causes! Marxists believe history has a pattern or lessons. Non-Marxists like Alan Taylor (who taught me history) thought history is a series of accidents. As Taylor had said many a time the first war was triggered because on the “fateful July 28 1914,all the six…