Asian Lite News Archive

Category: Lite Blogs

  • India & Social Progress Index

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    India ranks 101th in the Social Progress Index among 133 countries, lower than even Nepal. Saeed Naqvi analyses the plight of the new world power  The embarrassing news that India ranks 101th in the Social Progress Index among 133 countries, lower than even Nepal, may well be the right occasion to narrow the focus on states which…

  • The ‘Days’ of the Jackal

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    Frederick Forsyth’s ‘novel’ career in international intrigue…writes Vikas Datta for top Brtish-Asian newspaper Asian Lite If you want to know how to attempt the assassination of a statesman, track a Nazi war criminal, organise a coup in Africa (or avert one in Russia), get a false passport, blow up a safe or assemble a bomb (conventional or…

  • AAP’s self-annihilation

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    Is fate on Modi’s side as AAP leaders attack each other over petty isssues…writes Amulya Ganguli  The Aam Admi Party’s (AAP’s) suicidal tendencies are bound to help the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) more than any other party because the saffron outfit is politically better placed to exploit them. If the AAP hadn’t been driven by competitive egos, it might…

  • Ganguly always got it right

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    By Veturi Srivatsa  India’s first cricket captain to win back-to-back series in the West Indies and England, Ajit Wadekar was called lucky. Sourav Ganguly, the other captain who gave the team confidence of winning overseas, is also lucky in a different way. Just as the knowledgeable think that Wadekar was lucky to inherit a top-rate…

  • Masrat Alam a rock stuck in Mufti’s throat?

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    By Sheikh Qayoom   Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mufti Muhammad Sayeed’s decision to “provide democratic space to separatist politics” by releasing Masrat Alam has badly backfired. Instead, the decision had made hardline positions on two sides even harder. Alam’s arrest in 2010 was “a hard earned success” for the security forces as the intelligence agencies…

  • The humanitarian crisis at Yarmouk

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    By Dr Omar Gabbar writes about life in Yarmouk, the Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Damascus in Syria. In recent months and years, the name ‘Yarmouk’ has come to be a byword for suffering. A Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Syria’s capital Damascus, its population has variously been ignored, starved, bombed…

  • Out with the truth on Netaji’s death

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    Angry and shocked over the alleged snooping on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’ family by successive Congress governments, concerned citizens here termed it a “national shame” and demanded to know the truth that is purportedly buried in secret government files. United in rage, a large section of eminent personalities and commoners alike have called for the…

  • Gandhi bastions in UP fall on bad times

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    By Mohit Dubey  Having basked in envious glory for the past few decades, the Gandhi bastions of Rae Bareli and Amethi in Uttar Pradesh seem to have fallen on bad times after the ascendancy of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government at the centre. With the union government red-flagging an ambitious mega food park project…

  • ‘Tory vision good for BAMEs’

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      By Amandeep Singh Bhogal, Conservative Candidate for Upper Bann, in Northern IrelandOn May 7, this country will face the most important general election of a generation. The choice is clear: between a competent Conservative Party that is working through a plan to build a brighter future for you, your family and Britain – regardless…

  • IPL: DISASTER OF THE DANCING GIRLS

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA Ah, my favourite hobby horse. Can’t help but take one more ride on it. The hideous hypocrisy of having only white women doing that silly jump up and down stuff at the IPL cricket venues ad nauseum is a testament to our double standards. See, we are so chaste, so pious, so…

  • Hillary Vs the rest

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    By Arun Kumar   The US presidential race took off with Hillary Clinton finally jumping into the fray with an aura of inevitability, but that analysts suggested may turn out to be the former secretary of state’s biggest handicap. In her second bid to break the glass ceiling and return to the White House, the former…

  • Rediscovering Gandhi in a globalised age

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    By Rajdeep Pathak  It’s almost a month since British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond visited India, a few days before Mahatma Gandhi’s statue was unveiled at Parliament Square in London in the presence of Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. Call it a coincidence, the visit was appropriately timed on March 12, the day 85 years ago…

  • Gujarat, Delhi or Tripura?

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    By Saeed Naqvi The embarrassing news that India ranks 101th in the Social Progress Index among 133 countries, lower than even Nepal, may well be the right occasion to narrow the focus on states which might be examined as milestones. This examination will have to be done by serious social scientists. An itinerant journalist can…

  • WHY VIOLENCE WINS

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA If it bleeds it leads. In 45 years of journalism that was the diktat common to every paper I worked on or ran. The worse the news the more the sales. Scandal, death, blood and gore wrapped in cynicism sold. We always convinced ourselves that was what the reader wanted, print and…

  • Kashmir home we left behind 25 years ago

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    By Shilpa Raina I have always found it tedious to answer the question: “Which is your hometown?” Not because I am a daughter of an army officer or belong to a family of travellers, but because “I was born in Srinagar and was brought up in Jammu.” I have been using this statement since the…

  • CPI-M work out plan to strengthen party

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    By Mohammed Shafeeq   The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) will chalk out a strategy to rebuild and strengthen the party besides electing a new general secretary at its 21st Congress, beginning here. Sitaram Yechuri, member of the party’s outgoing central committee, is tipped to take over from Prakash Karat, who has been at the helm…

  • THE BALD AND THE BOUNTIFUL

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA I am told that you can get a robot to fix your bald patch for the princely sum of $15,000. You could buy a half way decent car with that money. I don’t understand why you would bother. For one, unless your hair fell out when you were 25 and life stretches…

  • India Inc. can outsmart Chinese : Havells India

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    By Gokul Bhagabati   With manufacturing at the core of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” campaign and labour costs in China eating into margins, India’s electrical goods manufacturers see little threat today from cheap imports, says Havells India chief Anil Rai Gupta. “The competition will be there. But the threat of unhealthy competition is…

  • Bollywood’s eternal romance with Kashmir continues

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    By Sheikh Qayoom and Aadil Mir  Bollywood’s romance with Kashmir that began in the 1960s and blossomed in the 1970s and 1980s, was interrupted for over two decades by violence that plagued the Valley. Bollywood then shifted its outdoor shoots to Europe and America. As violence began waning, Bollywood like a smitten lover, rebounded to…

  • Rahul’s absence puts question marks?

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    By Prashant Sood   Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s long “leave of absence” appears to have accentuated the debate in the Congress on his possible elevation with clear differences among party leaders on the issue. While a section wants him to assume the mantle at the earliest, there are leaders who want party president Sonia Gandhi to…

  • SHOT IN COLD BLOOD

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    Think about it. And it is so frightening. Nothing provokes it and yet, a life is lost. Somewhere is South Carolina, a young Afro-American woke up and had breakfast, then took his car for a drive unaware that his tail light was crushed. It happens. We do not make a circular inspection of our cars…

  • The actions of ISIS are an indignity to Muslims around the world

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      Imam Qari Asim MBE – Imam at an award-winning mosque, Leeds’ Makkah Masjid and Senior Editor at Imamsonline.com If anyone had doubts as to the level of depravity ISIS will resort to, then daily examples of murder, rape, slavery, torture and now destruction of religious and cultural heritage will give a glimpse of what…

  • REALLY, JUST LEAVE ME ALONE

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA There you are at the airport all checked in and waiting to board, looking forward to a few hours of anonymity and solitude. Time to read a book, watch a movie, switch off that horrendous mobile phone, have no intrusions, actually ease off and savour the flight. Might as well start the…

  • Flexible hours make workers happy

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    Allowing workers to choose the slot of hours they want to work in is good for their well-being, says a study from Loughborough University, England. The study found that people who become overworked are less satisfied with their lives and experience lower levels of psychological well-being. The key factor to happiness, according to the study,…

  • Why? Why? Why?

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    Questions to ponder. Wisdom in a capsule. Why are outgoings always more than incomings? Why are bargains always dramatically slashed after you bought something for three times the price? Why do the contents of a can of anything not look anywhere near like the picture on the cover? Green, large happy and shiny peas in…

  • Likud’s Victory Is Israel’s Defeat

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    The Europeans, Americans, and Palestinians, who have had extensive experience with Netanyahu throughout the peace process, fully recognize his duplicity. He has lost every grain of credibility and no one will trust that he will negotiate in good faith in the future …writes Dr. Alon Ben-Meir Those of us who regularly observe and try to…

  • NEEDS A LOT OF INVESTIGATION

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA The suicidal pilot who flew the A320 from Germanwings into the Alps taking 150 people with him makes for a bizarre page in aviation history. When the news broke I had written that aircraft of this generation do not simply fall out of the sky at cruising altitude. The words I used…

  • BBC exposes Tory cuts on benefits

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     The BBC News investigation uncovered several benefits under consideration for change, including Carer’s Allowance, Employment and Support Allowance, Job Seekers Allowance, Disability benefits and Industrial Injuries Compensation Scheme. Over 10 million people are receiving benefits from the government depending on their conditions…reports Kaliph Anaz The Conservative Party of Prime Minister David Cameron facing the wrath of…

  • SONIA: A ramshackle alliance and a missing son

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     Why Rahul Gandhi decided to a take a break, recalling his earlier periodic slumming in Dalit households, will not be clear till he breaks his silence. But, as of now, some of the effects of his absence are becoming clear. The most obvious of them is that Sonia Gandhi has had to return to active politics to…

  • VAJPAYEE: A giant in Indian politics

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    In the six decades he was in electoral politics, the now ailing Atal Bihari Vajpayee, presented the Bharat Ratna on Friday, catapulted from one who lost one election after another to a colossus who eventually became India’s only non-Congress prime minister to last a full five years in office. In the short but tumultuous period…

  • VIPS AT WEDDINGS

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA If you are having a wedding in the family and you are inviting VIPs or celebrities please don’t call me. There is nothing more disconcerting than standing there looking fatuous holding a pink wrapped gift when three guys with sten guns suddenly barge in to sanitise the place before the Minister pops…

  • WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA People have purple patches where everything goes right for them. What is the opposite of that? When things just go wrong in a series. You lose a document. You get a throat infection. The car breaks down. The domestic help ups and leaves. A dead debt comes alive and dances hideously in…

  • A day of Resolution for Pakistanis

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      Dr Qari Asim, MBE, Chief Imam, Makkah Masjid Leed 23rd March holds a significant place in the history of Pakistan. 75 years ago, on 23 March 1940 in Lahore Minto Park (now called Iqbal Park), the founding fathers passed the momentous Pakistan Resolution (Qarardad i Pakistan), which gave birth to the idea of an…

  • ‘Bibi Reveals His Duplicity’

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    By Alon Ben-Meir In a follow-up question to the statement that Prime Minister Netanyahu made during an interview with the Israeli website NRG–in which he stated that “I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state and evacuate territory, gives territory away to radical Islamist attacks against Israel”–he was asked if that meant…

  • GETTING OLDER: WHEN I AM 94

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA My friend’s dad is 94. He is spry and alert and loves to eat. But they won’t let him. Everyone else is cutting out pieces of his life to prolong it by making him miss it. The dimensions of what is allowed gets smaller by the day. He tells me how tough…

  • No VIP access to the gods

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    By Jaideep Sarin   VIPs will not henceforth get preference over common folks for quicker access to the gods. At least twice a year there were clamours among the Who’s Who of Chandigarh and the adjoining tri-state area to get closer to the divine with special passes for quicker access to the shrine. This time the…

  • Temple for Godse hurts Gandhi grandson

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    The unveiling of Gandhi statue at Parliament Square in London was shadowed by a comment from Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma. Gopal,  a former diplomat and a state governor, said when Britain was honouring Mahatma with a statue at a prime spot in the capital, a section in the Indian society denigrating the father of…

  • I GOT SPAMMED

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA Okay it looked like an urgent mail from someone I know. I opened it and it did not open. Ergo, it was dispatched to my mailing list. It’s a virus. It has blocked my email. I can’t access it. I have driven several friends mad with frustration because some of them might…

  • Young girls must reject dangerous attractions

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    The dozens of young Muslim girls who are running off to Syria to become jihadi brides – wives of potential martyrs – are obsessed about a death cult far more sinister than any vampire or zombie fiction has to offer…writes Ustadah Khola Hasan  Despite the age of strident feminism and self-assertiveness, teenage girls are still…

  • Farage’s UKIP =  BNP in New Bottle

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    Farage couldn’t understand why people kept calling him a Nazi…writes Yaseen Patel Hot on the heels of Channel 4’s The First 100 days of UKIP’ which was a fictional account, if the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) ever come into power- incidentally also the most complained about programme ever comes another. The BBC’s ‘Meet the UKippers’. This…

  • Spectrum demystified

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    By Aparajita Gupta   The issue of spectrum has been in news in India with unfailing frequency in recent times, for reasons both right and wrong. What does this term mean? How does it affect lives, yours and mine? A primer: Radio frequency spectrum is a band of electromagnetic airwaves, used to transmit signals. It can…

  • ENTER THE VIPS

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA So I came home with these two tickets to a very popular sold out concert and my wife had that look of reluctant admiration well married wives have for their husbands when they do something extraordinary and rare and my tickets were just that. Row A 16 and 17. Smack right dab…

  • YOU AND MURDEROUS RAGE

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA This is not an earth shattering, world shaking observation. Just a thought. All of us have a pet peeve, something that is our red rag and enrages us beyond normal limits. It could be simply someone slurping his food or fibbing openly or spraying malice or killing your time by being unpunctual…

  • Breaking Bad – Manchester Style

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    What Jamshed Javeed showed was these ‘independent self taught revolutionaries’ are nothing but self centered suicidal narcissists hellbent not only on the annihilation of their own life but also of anybody else’s be that their own family and whoever else they’re in contact with…writes YZ Patel What the recent imprisonment of Levenshulme’s very own Walter…

  • DANGER FOR INDIA’S DAUGHTERS

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA For some reason anything the BBC does is given great importance by the Indian mindset. Something to do with the ex-empire I reckon but we all respond with predictable indignation at their efforts to project India’s warts. A part of our psyche sees the BBC as the benchmark of quality and par…

  • India’s Daughter: A Note of Dissent

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      By Rajeev Poduval The government of India recently banned the documentary film Storyville: India’s Daughter by British filmmaker Leslee Udwin breathing life into an international discussion on the supposedly growing connoisseurship of rape and violence against women in the country. Undoubtedly, the brutality the film depicts is gruesome and raw. As the film takes…

  • Dirty politics in Aam Aadmi Party ?

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    Surprise will be felt because it was believed that the party had learnt the right lessons from the suicidal tendencies which it displayed after its electoral success last year. The need for piping down was evident from Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s call for eschewing arrogance during his speech after being sworn-in…writes Amulya Ganguli  For the Aam…

  • Saeed Naqvi on Modi’s Kashmir policy

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    Kashmir challenge: Modi could write history or blot it…writes Saeed Naqvi   A principal reason for Narendra Modi being swept to power in May was disgust with Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Manmohan Singh – indecisive, short on ideas, bereft of charisma and supervising a government of scams. In a house of 543, the Congress had 209…

  • Identity Politics & Radicalisation

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    Exploring this issue why someone is ‘radicalised’ gave no one universal answer why a individual decides to take the step into what is now known as ‘jihadism’ in the mainstream media. Investigating what makes a person inhabiting a seemingly comfortable existence with all the trappings and freedoms that are afforded to them, to partake in…

  • BBC DOCU – Don’t shoot the messenger!

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    Without even watching the documentary “India’s Daughter” about the Dec 16, 2012, rape of the woman who has come to be known as ‘Nirbhaya’ or ‘Braveheart’ in a bus in New Delhi, critics have accused BBC of “voyeurism” and worse for interviewing one of the convicted rapists…writes Arun Kumar  India’s ban on a BBC documentary on…