In the first of a two-part series, Tamal Bandyopadhyay explains why the ICICI Bank's board first rushed to deny all allegations against Kochhar and then took the extreme steps against her.
'Everybody says 5G and communication is important.' 'Everybody says automation, robotics, human computing interfaces -- people and machines working together -- is the future.' 'Everybody agrees that cybersecurity is something that is here to stay.' 'Everybody agrees that synthetic biology is important.' 'Instead of outlining thinking about industries for tomorrow and the future, let the evolutionary pathway be built in a way that it promotes robust, creative, thinking.'
'Let reservations be decided on the basis of the economic status of a family or person.' 'Give 30 per cent reservations to those whose yearly income is below Rs 200,000, and the remaining 19 per cent to those whose family's annual income is between Rs 200,000 and Rs 400,000.'
'May it be the guardian which calls for breaking down narrow walls of the mind.' 'May it continue to invite everyone to celebrate the possibilities of humanity's one-ness.' Claude Arpi salutes 50 years of Auroville, a Grand Experiment in Living.
Economic growth in the last two years has stayed above seven per cent.
'Whenever you see him on television or anywhere else, he gives off grandfatherly vibes.'
'No one took umbrage, because they knew Laxman had no malice in him.'
Sir Mark Tully on the magic of Indian elections. A fascinating excerpt from The Great March of Democracy: Seven Decades of India's Elections.
'The question now is how long the exercise in perfection he created will last once his influence isn't there any longer,' says Sunanda K Datta-Ray.
'These trends put at risk not only minorities or the media or some other out-of-favour group, they can and do concern everyone,' warns T N Ninan.
'The Post's coverage is not an authentic public discourse guided by unbiased Western intellectuals, but a slanted doomsday propaganda orchestrated by Indians and expatriate Indians,' argues Vivek Gumaste.
'There was a period when they questioned the flag and there were questions also against the Constitution.' 'That's long past.'
The successful implementation of the new Act will depend on a much bigger involvement of the state through a huge new superstructure of registration, certification and supervision
This will be 'an Uddhav Thackeray government controlled by a remote now held by Sharad Pawar.'
Tamal Bandyopadhyay offers some unsolicited advice for a government wh,ich came to power, with brute majority and the nation's pragmatic chief money man.
'Crafting a coherent, transparent and consistent policy vis-a-vis our neighbours, leave alone the rest of the world, is unlikely to be high on the priority list of the new Indian government, which will be sworn in before June,' says Ramananda Sengupta.
'N Ram and I met on the lawns of Mani Shankar Aiyar's bungalow.' 'I pulled out a rolled printout from my jacket and handed it to him.' 'In the cut-throat world of journalism, this was like high treason.' 'But letting a story be killed because you can't publish it is a bigger crime than passing it to the competition,' recalls Shekhar Gupta.
'What I remember best is the vigour with which she threw herself into the job, the passion she had for issues, particularly those that affected the poor.'
'Deep pockets have become a prerequisite for contesting elections on a major party symbol in most states.' 'Given the premium parties place on self-financing candidates, once you have accounted for the suspected criminals, dynasts, industrialists, and celebrities, there is not much room for anyone else.'
American lawmakers and experts called for cutting off aid to the country and listing it as a state sponsoring terrorism.
It is clear as daylight to anyone that a charge or a cost to simply reduce interest on a floating rate loan is extortion, but this is exactly what the RBI has officially sanctioned, says Debashis Basu.
The single most important issue in Public Sector Banks is corruption.
Modi may bet on old faces and new to boost reforms
'Patriotism is a sentiment, a feeling of belonging to a place.' 'Nationalism is an ideology, and like all ideologies, it is absolute and restrictive in nature,' Ashis Nandy, arguably India's leading social thinker, tells Geetanjali Krishna.
The media and social media are abuzz about the no-frills style of Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar and Delhi's to-be-CM Arvind Kejriwal, both very unusual politicians in today's India. But India has not seen a chief minister like Nripen Chakraborty whose spartan lifestyle and frugal habits were the subject of legend.
The crisis in Indian banking has now reached a point where the NPAs of many public-sector banks are higher than their net worth
In the crazily complex cauldron that is India, where caste, community, class and cash are just the primary ingredients, no one has yet come up with a fool-proof method to ascertain how voters make up their minds, on which button to press, in the privacy of their 'confessional' booths, notes Krishna Prasad.
Nobody is clear what 'minimum government maximum governance' means.
Bad loans continue to originate mainly from state-owned banks, where the top management's responsibility is not linked to career prospects nor has legal consequences, says Debashis Basu.
EU operates as one block at the climate change negotiations and takes a single greenhouse gas emission reduction target under the Paris Agreement
Two Nobel Laureates, four listed writers of this year's Man Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists, winners of Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Crossword Prize and film stars will be the attraction at the most sought after literary event in India -- the Jaipur Literature Festival.
Some 800 million or more Indians gaze at their mobile phones all day. Whoever can crack what's news on the mobile phone for them and their families, for a nominal payment of Rs 10 a month, is a winner, says Ajit Balakrishnan.
PM Modi's China visit may strengthen ties between both the countries.
While churches burn in the capital and lawmakers spew rubbish, Prime Minister Narendra Modi does not think it important to utter a word against these atrocities.
'If India maintains the Constitutional set-up that its founders envisaged -- which is that it is a parliamentary democracy, with a broadly speaking market economy, in which all people are equal as everyone votes, in which the rights of minorities are respected -- that will be a great thing.' 'Not just for India. But for humanity.'
'Rahul is only making a pathetic public spectacle of his lack of judgment and good sense by hallucinating that somehow, the Congress, or whatever political combine is cobbled together, will displace the BJP at the coming Lok Sabha election by constantly harping on the Rafale deal,' argues retired civil servant B S Raghavan.
The reality is that even successful Muslims are made to suffer because of their faith, and the opposition to Sania Mirza is part of the same story of discrimination, says Kashif-ul-Huda.
'The problem is not the performance under Vishal Sikka, but the quality of Infy's board of directors, argues Debashis Basu.
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