Sreehari Nair explains why Haraamkhor may just be the most liberating Hindi movie made since Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi.
'The military in Pakistan is capable and self critical, but intelligence is stuffed full of lifers who resist change, which is why career soldiers in Pakistan try with all their might not to be transferred into the ISI.'
I still believe that it is a good thing that think tanks are mushrooming in Delhi. They provide a platform for discussion, even if they shed more heat than light. With Parliament almost incapable of serious debate, informed discussion and civilised discourse, where does this nation get its intellectual churn, asks Mohan Guruswamy.
India's largest cow hospital provides care for 1,600 cows, bulls, oxen, that are sick, diseased, injured or deformed. With wards for cows with breast cancer, cows that have lost their legs in road accidents, cows that have been operated upon to remove plastic from their bellies, the hospice is a tourist attraction.
'The Indian and Israeli rabbis were singing a small departure song for brave little Moshe, who had spent many, likely, heartbreaking but bittersweet hours at this home of his babyhood, looking at the drawings his mother had made for him, that were still up in his room.'
If Pasbola seemed like he was testing Rai on his high school physics, Rai on the other hand, had relocated himself to a classroom of philosophy, offering beautifully inexact answers, arrived at after deep thinking.
'Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may be anxious for a farewell visit to Washington in October,' says retired Ambassador K C Singh, 'but bending backwards on America's PRISM policy is going to earn him scorn at home and contempt abroad.'
Is Devyani Khobragade's arrest connected to India detaining an anti-piracy ship owned by a US security firm, asks Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
Haider is a remarkable achievement and one of the most powerful political films we've ever made, a bonafide masterpiece that throbs with intensity and purpose.
On the face of it, some clauses in the new land ordinance looks pro-farmer but in reality it is not so. The problem is two-fold. The first is the vagueness of the law itself. The other problem with this ordinance is that it is against the very ethos of judicial interpretation, says Vidhan Vyas.
When people say the two-day visit was been successful in taking back the bilateral relationship to the political plane, essentially the reference (mostly left unsaid) is to the wresting of initiative from the intelligence 'agencies', whose meddling had hurt bilateral ties, says the distinguished editor Kanak Mani Dixit.
Two months after the Malaysia Airlines plane vanished into the skies, conspiracies have floated to explain the enigma of the vanishing flight. Amid these claims, one is that the plane was hijacked and is being prepped for a terror attack by the Taliban or by Israeli terrorists. Anvar Alikhan tries to piece this puzzle together and find out the truth behind flight MH370.
In his last column for Rediff.com, Praful Bidwai joins issues with those lauding India's covert operation against Naga rebels based in Myanmarese territory.
PM Modi seems to be gradually ending India's strategic ambiguity
Rajkumar Hirani, who rules critics' hearts as much as he rules the box office, is back after five years. Sonil Dedhia listens in as the filmmaker talks about PK (without dropping the cloak of secrecy of course).
The ordinary life lived in Pakistan is rarely a part of Indian imagination. This is this gap that Pakistani television serials have succeeded in bridging, says Mohammad Asim Siddiqui.
'Never lose your optimism. Never lose your aspiration and never -- even if India becomes a prosperous consumer society -- never ever lose that shining light in your eyes,' advises Dr Peter McLaughlin, headmaster of the Doon School.
'Every Ali obituary I read made the point that he 'transcended his sport' -- a reference to the many battles he fought with America even as he fought in America.' 'What the obituaries leave out is that Ali equally transcended the boundaries of geography and of information -- as witness the Chennai teen who assimilated that most mobile of fighters through still images shorn of context.'
The inspiring story of Birubala Rabha who will go to any lengths to protect the 'witches'!
Shatranj Ke Khilari remains an accessible, yet deep period film.
'It is only because we were facing US threats that we were able to successfully develop a nuclear programme of our own.'
