'These youngsters have proved there is money in sports today, not just cricket!' 'They are youth icons and people look up to them.' 'Our athletes are not scared. Like a child knows no fear, they are youngsters without fear.'
Narendra Modi's positive engagement with Barack Obama has well and truly washed away the doubts and slights of the past.
'He needs to control his foot soldiers by taking either stern action against the over enthusiastic members of his group or convince them to stop causing him this embarrassment.' 'We know that most of these leaders are not going to be prosecuted by Indian authorities. So we are seeking alternate means to bring them to justice,' FIACONA President John Prabhudoss tells Aziz Haniffa/Rediff.com
Incidents like these are a wake-up call, says School Education Secretary Anil Swarup. 'Today, if a particular problem has been found, technology allows solutions to address it,' he says, suggesting alternatives such as printing and distribution of encrypted question papers on the day of the exam. Swarup wants electronic tracking to keep tab on who has access to and can, therefore, leak papers.
As the pandemic unfolded, the India-China relationship has come under severe stress. To restore normalcy, agreements between the two countries must be respected scrupulously in their entirety. Where the Line of Actual Control is concerned, any attempt to unilaterally change the status quo is unacceptable, declares External Affairs Minister Dr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.
'If Rao had, in fact, given a word to President Clinton in 1994 that India would not test, he would not have encouraged Vajpayee to test. The note, said to have been handed over to Vajpayee by Rao with the words, 'Now is the time to accomplish my unfinished task' may not have been a reference to nuclear tests at all,' says T P Sreenivasan.
The Ayodhya judgment of November 9 draws on both the polytheism of Hinduism and the modern rule of law, says Deepak Lal.
At 70, going by hospital records made public, most age and health-related arguments put out against super-star Rajinikanth's entry into politics, before he withdrew citing a 2016 kidney-transplant, hold good for Sasikala, too, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
'If India employed a strategy of a 'thousand cuts', Pakistan will wither away.'
'The CBI should be bifurcated and the CBI's charter should be restricted to anti-corruption cases.'
'The investigation of major criminal cases having national and international implications, and national crimes spread over more than one state may be entrusted to a new national crime bureau,' recommends Dr Madhav Godbole, the former home secretary.
The Delhi metropolitan area has one of the highest concentrations of population in the world, and suffocating the people of the area on an annual basis should be treated as a crime against humanity, especially when the cause for such suffocation can be controlled, says Arvind Kumar.
'We must begin dialogue with openness and goodwill, but we will not proceed very far without trust and good faith. The alternative is the violence of 'might is right,' which settles very little and destroys so much of real value,' says Dr Rudolf C Heredia, author of Religious Disarmament -- Rethinking Conversion in India.
'Is Trump going to play a mediating role? Can he play a mediating role? It's out of the question.' 'Kashmir is an Indian responsibility.'
A realistic assessment will tell us that not much has changed between India and Pakistan; the relationship remains as fraught as before with little prospect of reconciliation, notes Ajai Shukla.
The protests were triggered by the two attacks on their colleagues.
Small and medium enterprises had complained of tedious compliance burden under the Goods and Services Tax
Do Modi's foreign visits actually serve India or they nothing more than expensive tools for domestic positioning and image-building, asks Shehzad Poonawalla.
'The success or otherwise of Modi's foreign policy will largely depend on the equation he is likely to strike with Donald Trump.'
Here's the full text of President Ram Nath Kovind's customary address to the joining sitting of Parliament on the first day of the budget session.
The United States has said that in-person registration of domestic workers of foreign diplomats would be mandatory, an apparent fallout of the arrest of Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade over alleged misrepresentation of the salary paid to her maid.
Asserting that while trade between India and Norway has been expanding but there is significant potential waiting to be realised, he said, "The new government is taking a number of measures to encourage investments, revive the manufacturing sector in India, promote skill development, develop smart cities and engage closely with all interested partners and investors in India and abroad to make this happen".
Schools in the Valley will reopen next week, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Secretary B V R Subrahmanyam said.
India has the fourth highest number of malaria cases in the world.
'The events of 2020 have actually put our relationship under exceptional stress.' What External Affairs Minister Dr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told the All India Conference of China Studies on Thursday, January 28, 2021.
'Islamist terror groups have never been challenged ideologically. As long as their ideology survives, like cancer, these groups will sprout somewhere else, says Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
Unless the judges factor in the ungovernability of technologies and their beneficial owners, present and future Presidents, prime ministers, judges, legislators and officials handling sensitive assignments may become redundant with reference to their age-old roles for securing 'national resources and assets', warns Dr Gopal Krishna.
The Supreme Court on Friday said it will await the government's stand in its endeavour to examine a plea to legalise passive euthanasia by means of withdrawal of life support system to terminally-ill patients.
Deployment of THAAD in South Korea could unfold a new cataclysm in the Korean Peninsula with unwelcome prospects.
'The Olympics postponement may not be a political body blow to Abe Shinzo, but it is no denying that the economic cost of the postponement of the Games will be heavy for Japan,' observes Dr Rajaram Panda.
'Earlier India as part of the Third World fought for the rights of the Palestinians. But oddly the defeat of the Congress and the decline of the Nehruvian imagination has altered such perceptions. The new middle class expresses an open sympathy for Israel, contending that Jews like many Hindus has been misunderstood,' says Shiv Visvanathan.
'The josh is very high as we fight this global pandemic.'
The Islamic State released a five-minute video on Sunday purportedly showing the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians that they captured in Libya.
'Muslims should not justify demolition of temples by foreign invaders.'
The Opposition, which had been demanding that the bill be referred to a 'joint select committee', staged a walkout when its demand was rejected by the government.
'Over the last two decades, the India-French relationship has grown steadily, no major political difference having darkened the sky between Paris and Delhi,' says Claude Arpi.
US congressional leaders on trade and finance wrote to the US International Trade Commission calling for a second investigation into India's 'unfair' trade practices, detailing any changes under Modi.
At least a dozen officers from Gujarat are handling key assignments in various important central positions
The Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance were ranged against each other both inside and outside the Parliament on the opening day of the budget session on Monday.
'Nehru is often portrayed as a visionary with his head in the clouds. But he had his feet firmly planted on the ground when it came to building and nurturing institutions and setting them on the right path with the right traditions,' says B S Raghavan.
