Shreekant Sambrani

Dec 09, 2011

Other side of America

Heav’n has no rage… Nor Hell a fury like a woman scorn’d,” wrote William Cosgreve. Mitt Romney, loving husband of Ann, probably could understand Sandy’s random ire. But poor Mittens has no notion of the scorn he might have heaped on Michelle and her 65-odd million American sisters who denied him the presidency of the United States.

Will Obama be the one again?

A week is a long time in politics. The wordly-wise Barack Obama would ordinarily dismiss this as a cliché, except that it was only too true this past week as far as his campaign to retain the American presidency is concerned.

Our mood swings

Why this kolav-eri, kolav-eri di?” warbled young India last April, in sympathy with the heart-broken Tamil underclass lad of the soup song. It has now come to light that even the not-so-young and not-so-poor urban India was singing its own elegy at the same time.

Milkman academic revolutionary

You people know the cow has two ends and one is more important than the other, but don’t know which end that is,” said the member of the board of governors of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad

Teaching kids to fish

Confucius said, “Give a hungry man a piece of fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will never go hungry again.” The tragedy of Indian education, 65 years after Independence, is that for the most part, it does not even attempt to teach fishing.

Cracks in the earth tell a distressing tale

Now is the summer of our discontent, made inglorious by power trips and monsoon failures. The former affected 60 crore Indians on July 31 and the latter will continue to haunt a like number (though not entirely overlapping) in the weeks to come.

The gritty reconciler

In her Nobel lecture last month (delayed by two decades because of her incarceration) Aung San Suu Kyi referred to Buddhism’s six great dukhas (sufferings). The last two of these are “to be parted from those one loves (and) to be forced to live in propinquity with those one does not love.

Win one for the Gipper

George Gipp was a champion American football player at University of Notre Dame. He died of pneumonia in 1925 shortly after being named an All-American player. On his deathbed, he is supposed to have told his coach, the legendary Knute Rockne, to tell the team that “when things are wrong… win just one for the Gipper.

Budget 2012: Will UPA surprise?

Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee is obviously a worried man as he gets ready to present the Union Budget on March 16. He has admitted to losing sleep over the mounting burden of subsidies. That is not his only worry.

Everything that could go wrong did

If you believed that the Congress-led UPA government achieved nothing on the economic front this year, think again! It is not every day that you manage to antagonise the entire political Opposition, from the BJP to the Communists, your allies, and some of your own party members as well. Add to that the disappointment of business classes and trade unions alike. The long-suffering aam aadmi and kisan, whose names the ruling combine invariably invoked to justify whatever actions it took (or, as in most cases, did not eventually take), had nothing to cheer them either.

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