Asian Lite News Archive

Category: Lite Blogs

  • Marital blues that make many NRIs dread

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    By Anurag Dey    At a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is reaching out to the Indian diaspora, some NRIs are claiming they even dread the idea of visiting the country of their origin because of what many of them call “demonic matrimonial laws”. From their passports being impounded to losing their jobs after being…

  • Tory bid to tackle extremism divides

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    The events in France condemned by everybody within these isles and beyond has not stopped the collusion by the Communities Minister Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon and Eric Pickles the Communities Secretary to do more to tackle extremism within the Muslim population of the UK…writes YZ Patel   Whenever anything happens that concerns the religion of peace then immediately…

  • Palestine in the ICC: A game changer?

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    By Hardeep S. Puri and Omar El Okdah The year 2014 ended with a cliff-hanger for the Israeli-Palestinian question. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas signed the Rome Statute on New Year’s eve, a day after a UN resolution mandating Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank failed to pass at the Security Council. As a result,…

  • NO MORAL SUPPORT PLEASE

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA It’s free. And it’s worse than advice as an imposition. It’s called moral support. Advice is far easier to handle. You can take it or reject it or even select the fragments that suit you and get rid of the rest. You have control. Not so with moral support. It has an…

  • Modi reassuring figure for Muslims

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    By Mohammed Shafeeq Narendra Modi is a reassuring figure for Indian Muslims but not the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) yet, says Zafar Sareshwala, the most high-profile Muslim aide of the prime minister. The Gujarati businessman, who took over as the new chancellor of Moulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU), believes Muslims are closer to Modi…

  • Shhhh! Gods are in deep meditation

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    By Vishal Gulati   Don’t make noise! The deities have returned to the heaven and are in deep meditation. Residents of 10 hamlets located on the outskirts of this picturesque tourist resort, some 250 km from the state capital, don’t allow anyone to make noise — in this time of the year. They themselves have stopped…

  • “Bibi’s Policies Fueling Anti-Semitism”

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    Alon Ben-Meir, professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU, comments on latest world events I am no longer surprised by what Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu says or does. No leader with any pride and sensitivity would have tried to exploit for political gain the tragic deaths of four French Jews who were…

  • The mirage of defence indigenisation

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    By Avishek Rakshit  While the hike in defence sector FDI to 49 percent and the ‘Make in India’ campaign have opened up newer possibilities for both indigenised equipment makers and joint ventures with foreign partners in the defence segment, the MSMEs are hamstrung by their inability to meet defence tender parameters and shortcomings in technology…

  • A make over for coconut industry

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    By Sanu George It’s time the coconut industry in India got a makeover. Producers and officials lament that although India is one of the largest producers of coconuts, it has failed to extract exquisite high value goods – unlike some other countries. Even some non-coconut producing countries are using coconuts to manufacture a wide variety…

  • Tectonic shift in Cuban ties

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    By Amit Dasgupta  Crafted in extreme secrecy and brokered by Pope Francis, the thaw in US-Cuba relations is a tectonic shift in international relations and quite possibly the boldest initiative of 2014. So stunning and unexpected was the announcement that its implications are yet to be fully fathomed. In India, not surprisingly, the self-absorbed media…

  • CHARLIE HEBDO ATTACK: JE SUIS AHMED

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA My name is Ahmed Merabet. Not Francois or Pierre or Gaston. Just Ahmed. I was a French policeman in Paris on duty when the gunmen struck the Charlie Hebdo magazine’s offices. They killed me in a spray of  bullets and in cold blood. I did my duty as an officer of the…

  • Only men can be lethally stupid!

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    The Funny Side by Nury Vittachi  If you play the movie “A Hard Day’s Night” backwards, it’s about four boys who wander through London making unearthly noises that cause huge crowds of girls to back away, screaming. It’s actually quite good that way. And the truth is, women should back away screaming when approached by men,…

  • FIRST THE PROOF THEN THAROOR

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA Trial by TV continues in India with vigour and a complete absence of legal protocol. I was watching one talk show last evening and the way it went they might as well have tied Shashi Tharoor to a post, given him a last cigarette and shot him. Someone was teed off that…

  • PRAVASI BHARATIYA DIVAS: THE BIG, FAT INDIAN GET TOGETHER

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA There are five good reasons why I am not going to the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas celebrations in Gandhinagar starting in 24 hours. These reasons have held their own since 2003 when this whole love affair with NRIs began. For those anglicised folks of our 30 million diaspora who do not know what…

  • Sheen off Padma awards

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    By Vishnu Makhijani  Once again a controversy has erupted over the Padma awards even before they have been officially announced with shuttler Saina Nehiwal, an Olympic bronze medallist, throwing a fit over not being considered and the sports ministry meekly caving in. The issue erupted on Friday with Saina tweeting her disappointment at her application…

  • Modi must resolve inner contradictions

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    By Amulya Ganguli  The year ended by confirming the BJP’s upward mobility when the alliance led by it secured a majority in the Jharkhand assembly and the party put up its best ever show in Jammu and Kashmir. But there is a hint in both the elections that the party’s ascent may not continue to…

  • AT ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT 

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    Daily Dose by Bikram Vohra You don’t have to listen to me, kid, said 2014, the young never do, but it’s tough holding out all year, even beauty queens have easier reigns. 2015 stuck his pin in his diaper and said, hey old man, but you better get going, you have a plane to catch,…

  • One year without Sachin at the crease

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    By Biswajit Choudhury  The year that the Indian cricket team played without Sachin Tendulkar and lost successive Test series abroad gives enough food for thought on the nature of the sport, also at a time when other team sports in the country are beginning to organise commercially on the lines of the Indian Premier League…

  • Opportunity awaits in gold in 2015

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    By Vatsal Srivastava Market participants are yet again headed into a New Year with a bearish outlook on gold. This reflects the ongoing adjustments in the US interest rate cycle. It is the consensus view that the US Federal Reserve will start tightening monetary policy by June, which will push real interest rates higher and…

  • Chandy had a whale of a time

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    By Sanu George   Just as 2014 began when Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy saw the withering away of the Left-sponsored protest against what is known as the Solar scam, the year is coming to a close with a morale-boosting victory over his state party president V.M.Sudheeran when the liquor policy was tweaked. Overall for Chandy,…

  • Vajpayee: Apostle of peace, humanity personified

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    By Ashok Tandon  A 28-year-old dhoti-kurta clad young man was jostling to push his blanket-wrapped baggage into the unreserved compartment of a passenger train at Delhi Railway station on May 8, 1953. It was a send off for Shyma Prasad Moookerjee, founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (predecessor of the present day Bharatiya Janata Party),…

  • Sony hacking: vandalism or terrorism?

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    By Monish Gulati As South Asia was watching the terrible tragedy at Peshawar unfold another drama was coming to head in Hollywood. At the eye of the storm was ‘The Interview’, a comedy by Sony Pictures Entertainment that depicts a fictional assassination of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un. What began with the hacking of Sony…

  • Citizen Khan is a big torture….!

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    Y.Z Patel reviews the latest edition of Adil Ray’s Citizen Khan Having watched the Christmas episode of Citizen Khan I don’t know what’s more excruciating. Having both legs and arms amputated with a blunt hacksaw whilst having your teeth pulled out with a pair of pliers and simultaneously having needles gouged into your eyeballs by…

  • Isolating Moscow will not help

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    By Amit Dasgupta By all accounts, the Russian economy is in imminent danger of collapse. After a period of relative economic stability under President Vladimir Putin, the rouble is now in free-fall. The central bank has announced an increase in interest rates from 10.5 percent to 17 percent. It failed to stabilize the rouble. This…

  • Shattering Israel’s Image

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      By Alon Ben-Meir No Israeli government has shattered Israel’s international image more than the Netanyahu government has over the past six years. Not only have Netanyahu and his cohorts systematically been engaged in rancorous public narratives against the Palestinians, but they have taken action that could only attest to his unwavering commitment to expand…

  • GET OUT OF MY WAY

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA Two things that ticked me off yesterday. One, three occasions when three idiots parked their vehicles on the white line ensuring that they had invaded the second square so that when you came back to your car there was 5.6 inches between your door and the side of that badly parked car…

  • CREDIT CARDS AND HIGH NOON

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA Do you love your credit card? I hate them. But what really goes up my nose is the huge gap between the bank per se giving you service and the demand it makes on you to give these institutions what you owe them. Like at 0820 you get call telling you that…

  • Malala appeals to world leaders

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    Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai has written an open letter to world leaders seeking help on Climate Change, education and slavery Malala calls on world leaders to make 2015 the year in which they and the rest of the world “commit to seeing the last child out of school, the last child forced into slavery and…

  • PALESTINE: Trapped In Their Public Narrative

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    The upcoming March 2015 Israeli elections provide the Palestinians a momentous opportunity to engage in reconciliatory public narratives by stating their readiness, willingness, and ability to negotiate in earnest to achieve a lasting peace based on a two-state solution…writes  Dr. Alon Ben-Meir, professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU The…

  • Is it still a nasty party?

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    There is something wrong with the Conservatives….writes YZ Patel “There’s a lot we need to do in this party of ours. Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies. You know what some people call us – the Nasty Party. Theresa May, Chairman of the Conservative Party, October 2002  The problems with…

  • THE ‘RANGED MARRIAGE

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA One of the risks of coming home to India is being co-opted into a game called arrange the arranged marriage. It is not a trivial pursuit and, unlike the love marriage, is played in deadly earnest. In love marriages, people either run away together, exchange promises they will not keep or, unrequited,…

  • SO WHO’S A COMPUTER GENIUS

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA I am no genius when it comes to computers and the Net per se. Currently my little machine which is actually a glorified typewriter plus FB for my column and not much else has been invaded by little gremlins which I believe are called viruses. I don’t know where they came from…

  • What conversion?, asks Agra converts

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    By Brij Khandelwal  The “conversion” to Hinduism of some people of a settlement on the outskirts of this city has triggered a debate in parliament, but the residents say they haven’t converted and wonder what the hullaballo is all about. About 55 odd families are now a worried lot after their “conversion and home-coming” ceremony…

  • RSS marching ahead in UP

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    By Mohit Dubey   Since Narendra Modi became the prime minister in May, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) has been merrily expanding its network in populous Uttar Pradesh. In recent months, the RSS — founded in 1925 and traditionally weak in the sprawling state — is focussing on widening its influence among Dalits and in the…

  • God’s post office at Sabarimala

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    By Sanu George   It is a unique post office, and one of its main tasks is to deliver letters to God. Located near the famed Hindu temple at the Sabarimala hills, the post office may perhaps be the only one in the country which doesn’t work round the year. It comes alive when the peak…

  • News happens and breaks on Twitter

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    By Aparajita Gupta   In this age of a rapidly changing world, micro-blogging site Twitter is fast catching the fancy of Indians and as “news happens on Twitter, news breaks on Twitter”, the US-based company is very bullish on this country. “India is one of the fastest-growing markets for Twitter globally. News happens on Twitter, news…

  • Mamata’s U-turn makes opponents frown

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    By Anurag Dey   West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s volte face on the Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) with Bangladesh and her support to it has brightened the hopes of thousands of enclave dwellers and left the opposition parties frowning. The opposition is wondering about the sudden “u-turn” by the Trinamool Congress supremo, whose opposition earlier…

  • FEAR OF FORMS

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA If I was given a shot of truth serum and asked what I really loathe, like heartily dislike I would say, forms. I hate forms. Filling them in drives me in paroxysms of rage and I have seen grown men break down. I remember the old days they would ask on the…

  • Story of a judge living in cloud cuckoo land!

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    Even there is a cabinet minister with a surname Patel. But Honourable Peter Hollingworth, a JUDGE, ridicules a victim with racial prejudices….YZ Patel comments They’re in politics, education, property, agriculture,landowning pharmaceutical, chemical, medical, plastic, finance, steel, building construction,ceramic, precious minerals, hospitality. Any industry you can think of at all echelons they are there. They are the…

  • SISTER LOVE: GUTS NOT GLORY

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA A good friend of ours is under the knife this morning. She is donating her kidney to her sister. Easy to say. Giving kidney to her sister, now what’s for dinner, shall we see a movie tonight, sweet of her, yes. God forbid, we have to make that choice. It is terrifying…

  • Has Modi changed caste politics?

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    By Saeed Naqvi  Eminent TV anchor, Rajdeep Sardesai, has in a recent article drawn attention to the fact that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has restored balance to his cabinet by inducting Manohar Parrikar and Suresh Prabhu, two Gaud Saraswat Brahmins, as full fledged ministers. Some writers took him to task for his Brahminical digression, strange…

  • Oh My Lord! Lets Blame it on the Muslims

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    Payday loans, big finance institutions, pig farmers and anything else peddled but prohibited within the religion are surely next. Not selling much? Pesky Muslims again…writes YZ Patel Muslim are now the default choice for the ills of everything and anything. Not a day goes by when we are not in the news or being blamed…

  • 2015 – Be strong to tame your troubles!

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    Whatever the problem you have to remember there are people that care…writes YZ Patel as the new year looms around the corner As the year draws to a close, delving deep into the cerebral recesses to what has gone on in the year. Certain events still resonate and stand-out like a lighthouse beacon in the…

  • How Bibi Committed Political Suicide ?

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    Dr. Alon Ben-Meir, professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU, comments on the latest developments in the Jewish state Prime Minster Netanyahu’s insistence on passing a bill that will define Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people is as disgraceful as his denial that Israel is not an occupying power.…

  • IPHONE NEW PATENT: WHY I’M NOT TOO EXCITED ABOUT IT

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA Now that Apple has put in for a patent which will prevent your mobile phone from breaking into little pieces when you inadvertently drop it, we can be relieved that we won’t do that absurd juggling act as the precious instrument finds its clumsy trajectory to the hard ground. It is always…

  • Digital infidelity leading to marital discord?

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    By Vishal Gulati   Digital relationships are resulting in the collapse of family ties, it would seem. As more and more youngsters and newly-weds are logging on to e-relationships, family life appears to be indulging more and more in what is being called ‘digital infidelity’. The virus has apparently left many a couple looking for solutions…

  • PHIL HUGHES: WHY THE OUTRAGE, WHY NOT GO WITH THE FLOW

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    BY BIKRAM VOHRA I woke up early this morning to witness the Phillip Hughes funeral in a small town called Macksville in Australia. I don’t think anyone there or witnessing the tearful scenes on TV could have been unmoved. Even the Sydney Cricket Ground was full of hundreds watching on screen. Then I get this…

  • Bhopal Tragedy: Three Decades of Trauma

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    M.R. Narayan Swamy comments on Bhopal Gas leak“Can you go to Bhopal immediately? Something big seems to have happened. Many people have died. You can help out our local bureau and return after two or three days.” This was U.R. Kalkur, a marvel of a journalist who was the deputy general manager of UNI. He spoke…

  • You must earn your place in this country!

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    If we want to make constructive contribution to the society we live in and want to be part of then we must do things that allow us to do that…comments YZ Patel on the issue of discrimination at British workplaces Two paradoxical emails dropped in the inbox. One a report pertaining how British Muslims face…

  • Cry, the beloved country!

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    How fair is our justice system? Why there are two yardsticks to measure the crimes and perpetrators of crime…writes YZ Patel Picture the scene… A young Muslim, fervent in his beliefs but recalcitrant to those that the British authorities feel he should hold with regards to his religion. His family are also sharing of the…