While filled with startling insights and questions, and buoyed by terrific performances throughout, Newton suffers from a lack of end-to-end clarity. It is a near-great film but one that for some reason doesn't express itself fully, feels Sreehari Nair.
'When the Brexit bomb goes off, the shrapnel will wound us.' 'We will in the time-honoured tradition apply band-aids all over.' 'Those who shout the loudest will get economic relief like interest rate reduction and debt restructuring.' 'Others will go on living lives of quiet despair,' says S Muralidharan.
The first Bharatiya Janata Party government in Maharashtra headed by state party chief Devendra Fadnavis will be sworn in on Friday with Shiv Sena unlikely to join the new dispensation for now as talks continued between the two saffron parties for a tie-up.
'His is a naive genius which eludes the sophisticated. He is natural, lazy, effortless. He is no match for other stars. His acting is poor, his dancing is worse. Yet Salman as Salman is miles ahead of them....'
It's very easy to become barren inside if you don't take care of yourself, says Shradha Sharma.
Aseem Chhabra gives us the top films that enriched his year.
'The hotel room number can never total up to 8.' 'I fly First Class and won't take a pre-9am flight.' Check out Bollywood's travel plans.
If Paris really meant to serve as a landmark in recognising equity in climate negotiations, it should have heralded the second phase of the Kyoto protocol. Instead we have all countries, India and China included, all signing up with voluntary commitments in what can only be seen as a race to the bottom, reports Darryl D'Monte.
'India stands on the broad shoulders of an extraordinary civilisation. In some ways it is quite surprising that it hasn't fully embraced the power of that.' 'The prime minister speaks about Make in India. Let's remind ourselves also of Made in India. What made India great. What are the great things of the past which will help us make India even greater.' 'India stands on the broad shoulders of an extraordinary civilisation. In some ways it is quite surprising that it hasn't fully embraced the power of that.'
'He was an embodiment of old school courtesy and grace. It was embarrassing when he would insist on receiving and seeing off guests at the gate of his house! A trait he shared with another of great soldiers of India, Sam Manekshaw!' remembers Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
Former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru had sought American assistance and wrote to the then US president John F Kennedy to provide India jet fighters to stem the Chinese tide of aggression during the 1962 Sino-India war, according to a new book.
The IPL, all of a sudden, may have some catching up to do with the Big Bash.
If the radical Islamic movement had been largely peaceful, Headley would have probably found another way to ensure real life excitement.' 'But I really do believe that his relationship with radical Islam is real. Very real.' 'It was a match for his desires.'
The average Indian soldier remains as hardy as before but he is certainly confused with the pace of change occurring all around him. It is here that the leaders -- the officers -- will have to adapt themselves to the new reality, says Nikhil Gokhale
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.
India's Muslims need to assert their educational and economic upliftment and political empowerment rather than be provoked by communal remarks, says Mohammad Sajjad, reflecting on the Malda riot.
Rush is a rousing, thrilling film, feels Raja Sen.
'There is no evidence that it was Nehru who ordered this surveillance (on Netaji's kin). It was a very low-level Bengal-based operation.' 'Netaji's grandnephew Sugata Bose has written in his book on the leader that the existing evidence that Subhas Bose died in that plane crash is overwhelming. No historian looking at that evidence can come to a different conclusion.' 'Contrary to popular belief, there were very little differences among the three (Netaji, Nehru and Gandhi). Netaji was of the opinion that some amount of violence was necessary to bring independence for India.' Historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee says that the controversy over the alleged spying on the kin of Netaji is a damp squib.
With Beijing having had a profound rethink on India's admission as a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the tectonic plates of the geopolitics of a massive swathe of the planet stretching from the Asia-Pacific to West Asia are dramatically shifting. That grating noise in the Central Asian steppes will be heard far and wide -- as far as North America, says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
'Pink a movie that's assembled especially for that section of prejudice-free Indians who are all on this side of the screen.' 'Look...there's virtuosity staring at you, 24 Frames per Second.' 'Soak it in; more power to the revolution, more wax to the candlelight vigils,' says Sreehari Nair.
The retrospective tax decision reversing the January 2012 Supreme Court verdict in the Vodafone case has often been cited as the reason for foreign investors losing confidence in India as an investment destination.
'We felt why not have the hope that is intrinsic in every child's life, embodied in our happy protagonist and let viewers see the world full of double standards and confused adults around her through her innocent and questioning eyes?'
'The Army must always be balanced in response.' 'Rabble rousers will demand that it be given a free hand against anti-national elements in the streets. That is exactly what the adversaries want.' 'Burning the Kashmir Valley through the summer is their desire; the Army will never contribute to enhancing their aim,' says Lieutenant General Syed Ata Hasnain (retd), who served as the General Officer Commanding 15 Corps in Kashmir.
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel's sage advice remains as relevant today as it was during his lifetime, says Vivek Gumaste.
Pranab Mukherjee's book The Dramatic Decade: The Indira Gandhi Years takes the readers through the economic and social unrest of the period leading up to the emergency, rise and fall of leaders, many splits within the Congress, while promising to offer more in the next two volumes of the trilogy, says Nivedita Mookerji.
Making it easier to do business is a key element of our strategy, says Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar.
'It was only relatively recently that Subhash Kapoor was able to secure the sources in India, Afghanistan and Cambodia, that allowed him to get the really highest level objects, and that helped propel him in recent years up the ranks.'
Youngistaan neither says something new nor does it reinforce time-tested wisdom in a way that you actually want to pay attention to it, feels Paloma Sharma.
'If you say I won't talk to them at all, does terrorism stop?' 'Even if they say they will give up terrorism, "I will fight terrorism along with you," but even then you say I still won't talk to you until you do the following things, then that is a political call.'
The plan of UID/Aadhaar-based surveillance does not end with the collection of fingerprints and iris scan, it goes quite beyond it and poses a lethal threat to the idea of India, says Gopal Krishna.
PepsiCo India's new CEO admits to being an ardent follower of the world's management gurus and they clearly mould his outlook.
The full text of the speech delivered by VVS Laxman at the Pataudi Memorial Lecture in Kolkata.
'It will be interesting to see how Dr Patel handles gadflies with the maturity of egregiously petulant three year olds.' 'That Dr Patel does not, in so far as we can tell, cause society matrons to gush like hormonal teenagers can only be a good thing for him.' 'Look where their febrile imaginations and breathless prose took his predecessor.'
How much money the Modi government has already spent and is going to spend on all those foreign trips, muses Sunita Iyer
'The real danger in India right now is that identity politics is being stoked in extremely dangerous ways.' 'The narrative you get about churches in the mainstream Indian media and the narrative you get in the social media is very different.' 'Many Americans today want to appropriate Indian culture. They want yoga, but they say yoga has nothing to do with Hinduism. They want Ayurveda, but they say it's got nothing to do with Hinduism.' 'Hinduism has been failed by political constituencies in India -- seculars and the right-wing.'
'We saw how vigorous democracy was when it dislodged authoritarianism under Indira Gandhi. We saw its vigour again when it voted Mr Modi out of humble origins as prime minister. It was Nehru who laid that foundation for India and what is worrying today is Modi's rather imperial style of functioning,' says writer Nayantara Sahgal.
'Most of the time we do close-ups you'll be looking at the camera or your main lead, your leading lady, is left of the camera, right of the camera -- she's never there. So, your best close-ups are looking at some unfortunate-looking assistant director or a cameraman. All the romantic close-ups I'm looking at some guy.' Salman Khan tells P Rajendran/ Rediff.com how he shoots his romantic scenes.
In the second and concluding part of his interview, Gurumurthy outlines the two areas he believes the government should focus on.
Neha Manglik, the only female CAT topper this year tells us how she did it.
'A participant in many rounds of the border talks with China once told me that China seemed not interested in resolving the border issue as it wanted to keep it as a ready excuse to intervene in the sub-continent,' says Colonel (retd) Anil A Athale.