India is a country with contradictory approach in terms of education and employability. There is huge population of youth in the country but still there is a lack of skilled manpower and resultantly employment rate shows negative trends. It is a big question for the policy makers. So what and where is the problem? Today, the number of youth...
Smartphones are small innocuous looking gadgets often found lying innocently in our pockets or bags, but they are capable of causing massive psychological and physical damage to us and our children, if we do not learn to use them judiciously. It is now a proven fact that intensive use of these electronic devices can cause many mental and emotional problems...
The nation celebrated Rabindranath Tagore’s birth anniversary on May 9. His songs were sung, his poems were recited, discussions were held on his monumental contribution to the reawakening of the soul of India then mired in cultural decadence. But I wonder whether any serious discourse was held on his concept of nationalism and also over whether it still remains...
Speed ‘Stupefying’ Commissions are known to take considerable time to submit reports. But this time a ‘miracle’ happened. The Rural Development and Migration Commission submitted its interim report on the mind-boggling migration issue with a speed that has left many gasping in wonder. The commission set up by Trivendra Singh Rawat government in August last year started functioning from...
Every person in India has heard and read about the Harappan Civilisation, but very few are aware of its sub-cultures. This Harappan Civilisation lasted from about 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE and evolved from earlier settlements in the area. It extended over almost 1.3 million square kilometres, and had several large cities with baked brick structures and an intensive...
Growing demand for housing has given birth to several real estate mafias in the country. The whole gamut of real estate management is a scam and needs to be looked into Indian societies, since time immemorial, have been a witness to different kinds of mafias which posed serious challenges to governance. Even in the modern era of democracy, these mafias, in...
Recently, we have seen disturbing visuals of a minister’s confrontation with women from a remote village in Garhwal, protesting against the felling of trees, in his own constituency. The mountains are once again seething with anger at the destructive development being unleashed by a double engine government. To understand what’s happening, we need to go back in time. The...
Politics is not just an art of the possible but a game of the imponderables. The leaders wear a new hat, discarding the old, with the same ease with which they walk on eggshells. Swami Vivekananda’s father told him when he was a boy that he should not be surprised by anything that happens in life. The Swami remembered...
Be like a river. Be open. Flow. Sane advice rendered by Julie Connor, but in the case of rivers passing through urban settlements in the mountain state of Uttarakhand, and indeed in the rest of India, this perhaps is the one dictum various government agencies entrusted with ‘development’ have chosen to ignore. It is difficult to fathom the convoluted logic...
Every town or city has a part which is older than the rest of it and has an environment that has remained quite unchanged despite the rapid changes in the other parts. Dehradun, a valley town, also has this old area near the railway station, with its crowded lanes and bylanes. This is a world which is very different from...