Rahul Gandhi's speech: Less substance, more spectacle

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When Rahul Gandhi strode into Parliament yesterday with sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra in tow, he made heads turn. The idea was just that - to make heads turn. The Congress MP, who otherwise tours villages as his grandfather Feroze Gandhi once did, has been holding parleys with the PM and the Congress managers this past fortnight. But it took him 11 days to express concern about a 74-year-old man's health. He took full advantage of the Zero Hour to grab the spotlight. What he said wasn't earth-shattering in any sense, even though he insisted on that being a game changer. It represented a perspective, one of the many ideas floating within the 'Congress' which is now planning a counter-movement to undo the blunders made by the 'government' in the way it has handled the whole Lokpal issue and in particular, Anna's anshan. I find it hard to....

Why Indian celebrities are afraid to be political

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The Congress is not wrong when it asks Amitabh Bachchan to take a stand on the Gujarat riots of 2002. Bachchan spelt out earlier this week, in his blog, that taking on the role of brand ambassador of Gujarat tourism was to be read as an endorsement of Gujarat's rich cultural heritage and not of 'Gujarat - the state', 'Modi's Gujarat' etc. Bachchan is endorsing the Somnath temple, not the politics of Somnath. The two are entirely different things, from the way commercial Hindi cinema's biggest actor looks at it. But when Narendra Modi, who's in the SIT's firing line for his role in the riots, sees a big celebrity coming on-board to represent his state at exactly the same time, isn't he the slightest bit emboldened? And shouldn't Modi's smugness and cheekiness when he faced TV cameras after his 5-hour interrogation with the riot probe panel at....

CLINT‘O’BAMA: Making History & the Goldilocks Syndrome

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A factory called America is manufacturing history as we speak. And this product is far more novel than any previous good in the American peoples' collective experience. A white woman and a black man standing on the threshold of being 'the' official nominee of the Democrat Party. It doesn't matter who wins (if one were to just appreciate how rare such a selection of candidates is for that country). Of course, it does and the implications will be severe; a paradigm will shift. Either will hold numerous possibilities. Popular expectations and theoretical hypotheses of various schools of thought will wait with bated breath to see if a change of race or of gender will, in fact, give birth to a different American way. Will having a historical underdog in the chief commander's seat make any dent in the oil-guzzling, regime-changing, warring ways of the superpower. Alas, we won't know which....

The Pheel-good Rail Budget

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The Union Railway Budget presentation was a performance to behold. Throats were cleared, beards stroked, every member packed into his seat. The House was in session and all eyes were on Lalu Prasad as he held fort and how! It was a full dose of the most-imitable minister in true rustic style. He was as comfortable with his poetry in khari boli as with this budget prose. Even taking that theatrical pause, to translate himself into English. While the vernacular almost always scores as English struggles to find that perfect equivalent, Lalu ji did the impossible literal exercise, without the slightest hint of self-consciousness. Salutations and a little rhetoric out of the way, the report card was out. A greater profit and then it poured. The theme was more- and soon we'll have more trains, tracks, bogies, upgraded signaling systems- and less: cheaper fares, concessions. Feel good never felt....