Wordsmiths & Newsplumbers

  BY R.K. MISRA Victory invites fulsome acclaim, defeat a lingering loss. The Delhi State Assembly is finally in the BJP bag. Victor or vanquished, love and hate are being heaped a plenty depending on the side of the divide. Bouquets and brickbats are exchanging places with shameless singularity based on want, need and greed. Reactions, similarly, range from the pious to the profane. The desperation of the BJP for Delhi is akin to the lament of a direct recruit commissioner who missed being promoted to inspector. It has taken 27 years in the wilderness for the BJP -even after helming India for a decade plus under Prime Minister Narendra Modi- , to get into the driver’s seat in Delhi. Also pasted on the party has been the humiliation of being reduced to holding 3 and 8 seats respectively at the hands of a babe-in-the woods Aam Admi Party (AAP) in the 2015 and 2020 Delhi Assembly elections. Delhi has a 70-member State Assembly. The party came to power at the Centre in 2014 on...

  BY R.K. MISRA Uss gali meein kuch hua, iss khabar se mar gaye ! Aur phir kuch log, marjane ke darr se marr gaye !! So says an eminent Urdu poet . He speaks of the phantom fallacy of a panic-stricken mentality when the mere news of happenings across the street caused some to die while others perished, felled by just the fear of dying. Cancer kills but the fear of cancer kills faster. Walk into a cancer care clinic and a miasma of despair hangs heavy. Emotions spread taunt on stressed faces, giveaway creases on knitted brows, and an anxious demeanor vainly dodging doomsday prophecies is plastered all over.   Unlike the star reporters of today, the journalism of yore frowned on the faintest attempt at putting self before news. The story spoke and the byline bore the burden. This once, a     sliver of liberty would be in order for I am both the subject and the object of this engagement having faced the diagnosis and fought the disease over the last one year. ...

  BY R.K. MISRA A loophole in the law is like a bee in the political bonnet. A plug and play passion manifests when chasing power, and a stomp and strangle obsession when securely seated. A politician in power is a designer who learns to dress a loophole before a law is clothed. Even loopholes big enough to drive trucks through. The journey of the Lokpal law in India and the Lokayukta Act in Gujarat is a case in point. However, what drew immediate attention to the extent of the malaise infesting the political woodwork was a recent report in a national daily that the Lokpal, in the five years of its functioning, has ordered investigation in just 24 cases and granted sanction for prosecution in six only. The rejection rate of complaints, over this period of time stands at around 90 per cent and largely for not being in the correct format. Has India gone magically corruption-free under the Narendra Modi-led BJP government? The government in August 2021 told Parliament that the...

  BY R.K. MISRA Tongues tattle and tails wag. Come elections in India and political grammar goes for a toss .Tails start tattling while tongues go wag-a-wag and each anatomical accordion plays its own tune. If the ruling BJP oscillates between narcissism and idol-worship within, the Congress is a welter of confusion without. The first one represents the Right and if it is wrong, it is still right. The second one may be left of Centre, but still aspires to be right of the majority while holding onto the minority. The regional rulers in the states on the other hand, want their cake and eat it too. ‘I keep my state, we rule the Centre’. Thus you have a political cart in perennial push-pull mode’ Every election in India has its own idioms and idiots where parties are all shimmer and glitter but actually wear opaque eye-bands which inhibits them from watching their own see-through gowns as they go about cranking up sound decibels. For now, national attention is riveted to Delhi ...

  BY R.K.MISRA History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as farce, so goes a famous quote. Tragedy is the coal mine accident in Assam on January 6 where four people are confirmed dead and a national effort is underway to save the missing. The farce is that not one of the 26,000 abandoned rat-hole mines- in just one district of Meghalaya alone- has so far been closed despite an order, a decade ago. There are much more in many other. The nation-wide proliferation of illegal coal mining is a ticking time bomb that erupts like a boil on the body fabric of the country every time accidents take place. For the remainder, it keeps patiently nibbling away at the national economy creating black money barons while the establishment of the day is busy cherry picking piddly political opponents. Some North-eastern states of the country may be pock-marked with ‘abandoned’ yet activated illegal mines but the activity is rampant in other states like West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattis...

    BY R.K. MISRA   Blending ideas and inspiration works wonders. Mixing memory and desire stirs imagination but    coupling Allopathy and Ayurveda can be painfully punishing. In plain terms it is like fusing chalk with cheese. If the country’s medical fraternity has been in ferment at the Narendra Modi- led BJP government’s pre-occupation with ‘mixopathy’, Gujarat went through a tense last week after the health department of the state government called a meeting to discuss ‘practice of Allopathy by those who have studied Ayurveda’. ‘Mixopathy’ is a loosely coined term used to describe the integration of alternative medicine systems, such as Ayurveda, with modern medical science which is also called Allopathy. The term is a combination of the words "mix" and "pathy", which means disease. The turmoil began after the Health Department of the Gujarat government issued a latter on December 27 calling for a meeting of senior officials and representa...