After being elected president of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) in 1999, Najma Heptulla rang up the then Congress chief Sonia Gandhi from Berlin to convey the news but had to hold the phone line for an hour as a staff told her that 'madam is busy'.
Gandhi will now be seen in two upcoming OTT series -- Hansal Mehta's Gandhi, starring Pratik Gandhi in the title role, and Freedom at Midnight by Nikkhil Advani.
'In Parliament, he was the one person who stood for democracy and secularism even when the principal Opposition party was not very forthright in taking on the BJP and RSS.'
The government should provide home loan up to 25 lakh at a lower interest rate of 5 per cent to the people of the middle class, a prominent realtors' body appealed to the government against the backdrop of soaring home prices. G Hari Babu, president of the National Real Estate Development Council (Naredco), in an online interaction with Business Standard, said that the middle class in India accounts for roughly 30 per cent of the total population and is dependent on rental accommodation.
India's financial sector is dominated by large government-owned and private-sector banks.
Many were hoping that with Vajpayee's NDA gone, there would be a return to the Congress normal. Nobody was prepared for the opposite. Sonia Gandhi was sceptical. This became the only issue over which Manmohan Singh took on his party bosses and risked his government. Politically, it was riskier than the 1991 reform, recalls Shekhar Gupta.
National pistol coach Jung faces eviction from home within hours of returning from Olympics
'The war has been on for four weeks; the bombings are still on. I can hear it in my house.'
Carter was in politics, but not a politician, certainly not a transactional politician, points out Shreekant Sambrani.
Uncle Pai, as he was fondly called, inculcated in Indian children a love for and interest in India's glorious past and its heroes.
Captain Sharan and Flight Engineer Anil Jaggia both confirm that the hijackers seemed to know a lot about flying an aircraft. Without help from the ISI or the Pakistan army, it was impossible, points out Utkarsh Mishra.
A case of criminal conspiracy, corruption practices and undue influence on election has been registered on the complaint of two Congress MLAs, police said on Sunday.
'It is notable how humble he was and didn't want anything different just because he was a Tata.'
At 13, Naseer Khan left Bihar to work in a saw-mill in Bhutan. He learnt the craft of making sofas, and some of the pieces he made found a place in the royal palace. He returned home after spending 35 years in the Himalayan kingdom, and has continued making sofas, restoring old furniture and creating wire-gutting chairs, all that has become a dying art now.
Chandrakar along with another promoter of the app, Ravi Uppal was detained and put under "house arrest" in that country late last year following the ED's request for issuance of a Red Notice (RN) against them.
'After Om's untimely demise, he would call us every Sunday for the next two years to ask, "How are you doing my dear? How's the young fella?"'
The Bharatiya Janata Party on Saturday released its manifesto for the November 17 Madhya Pradesh elections promising MSP for wheat at Rs 2,700 per quintal and paddy at Rs 3,100 and houses for beneficiaries of the state's flagship scheme 'Ladli Bahna'.
'A very large part of this would have come from opium.'
In the Union Budget for Financial Year 2023-24 (FY24), Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had held forth on the need for better governance and investor protection in the banking sector. She had proposed certain amendments to the Reserve Bank of India Act (RBI Act), 1934; the Banking Regulation Act (BR Act), 1949; and the Banking Companies (Acquisition and Transfer of Undertakings) Act, 1970.
There was more to him than he let on, asserts Aditi Phadnis.
His cinema of compassion inspired me, gave me tools to develop empathy for others. But it also made me understand that serious, socially committed cinema with deeply engaging narratives and great performances is an art form to admire, appreciate and explore. Aseem Chhabra remembers Shyam Benegal, who passed into the ages on Monday evening.
Opposition members in Rajya Sabha on Thursday accused the government of imposing Hindi by bringing new bills with titles only in that language, a charge the treasury bench contested while alleging they were stuck with a colonial mindset.
Poet, writer and former IPS officer Keki N Daruwalla, whose magic with words gained him national and international repute, has died at a Delhi hospital after prolonged illness and a spell of pneumonia. He was 87.
'What scares me is the fact that there is so much content that people have content indigestion.' 'How do you entice people who have indigestion of content?'
As a consequence of prominence given to the brutality during those few days, a very important aspect of that episode got almost glossed over. This was the intervention by a very significant section of people who restored faith in humanity, and conveyed the message that only a small section of Indians, that too politically backed, were consumed by anti-Sikh majoritarianism. The overlooked facet of the events of 1984 was the story of significant sections of the city's populace, public figures and nondescript ones, stepping out hand-in-hand, to first stand with little but bravery in hands, in the way of attackers, and thereafter to provide immediate relief to those who lives were uprooted and who lost family members in the violence, recalls Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay.
Some residents have already taken this step to relocate, either temporarily or permanently, some to their native places and others to clean-air destinations like Goa and Himachal Pradesh.
Vikas Yadav, a former Indian government official charged by the United States authorities for his alleged role in a foiled plot to assassinate Sikh separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun on American soil, was arrested by Delhi Police in December last year in an unrelated extortion and kidnapping case, police sources said.
Three people were killed and scores of others, including around 20 security personnel and four personnel of the administration, were injured as protesters opposing a court-ordered survey of a Mughal-era mosque in Sambhal, Uttar Pradesh clashed with police on Sunday.
Megha Engineering had emerged as the second-biggest buyer of electoral bonds and donated the highest amount of about Rs 586 crore to the Bharatiya Janata Party, according to the data released by the Election Commission on March 21.
The CBI has registered a case of alleged violation of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act against human rights activist Harsh Mander and his NGO, and searched his premises on Friday, officials said.
India's second-largest passenger vehicles firm will be valued at Rs 1.59 trillion at the top-end of the price band of Rs 1,865-Rs 1,960.
Bhilar, a strawberry farming hub in Maharashtra, has been transformed into India's first 'books village'.
rediffGURU Samkit Maniar answers readers' personal income tax queries.
Buoyed by regulatory overhaul and infrastructure boom, engineering conglomerate Larsen & Toubro (L&T) has identified realty business as one of its growth engines for the next 10 years and plans to acquire land parcels while expanding pre-sales, said a senior company executive. L&T Realty has started looking out to acquire land parcels and grab partnership development opportunities across markets to scale up its business. "We are making some strides in that direction, albeit cautiously.
Had it not been for the slow but sure emergence of China as a threat to the western order, would India have been accepted as a near-equal partner by individual western nations, jointly and severally, questions N Sathiya Moorthy.
We asked colleagues, present and past, to reflect on a man who has made such a difference to their lives and careers. Here it is then, a rich collection of memories that offer enchanting glimpses of the enigmatic Ajit Balakrishnan.
'The die is cast. The wave is for her.' 'We will win this. The numbers are going to be higher than people are saying.' 'It is going to be more closer to Obama's numbers than Biden's numbers.'
Mumbai-based developers Macrotech Developers (Lodha) and Oberoi Realty have emerged as top gainers among largecap realty stocks over the past month, with gains ranging from 29 per cent to 33 per cent. Strong ongoing sales trends in Mumbai's core market, record bookings in the January-March quarter, and healthy guidance for 2024-25 (FY25) have propelled these companies, which derive the majority of their revenues from India's financial capital.
rediffGURU T S Khurana answers readers' personal income tax queries.
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