'I have some more things to do on this planet that will make me happy. Just because I have become a grandfather doesn't mean I am ready for retirement.' Boman Irani gets ready for a new phase in his life.
India in the last five-seven years did not do as well as it could to push progress.
The India-Afghanistan relationship does not have to be a template of each country's relations with Pakistan, and Delhi will do well to leave it to Ghani to redefine the parameters of Afghanistan's security cooperation with India. A zero-sum mindset can only exacerbate regional tensions, says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
Is it inconsistency in policy, or the lack of robust support?
'A veiled secret of India's defence and strategic culture is the lack of a serious interest in them by the political class. The Indian National Defence University would fill this void,' feels Lieutenant General Anil Chait (retd).
'The debate is not whether the Indian defence apparatus is in a state of disrepair, but whether it is capable of securing the defence of the country if any envisaged threat becomes real.'
NSA Menon's wisdom says that the idea to be superpower is not really desirable, it is better to be different. Sheela Bhatt reports.
When criticism mounted about projects coming to a standstill last year, the Manmohan Singh government sacked one of its Cabinet ministers. The buzz was that the minister had been sitting on clearances and refusing to approve the projects.
The Al-Qaeda and its patrons seems to have outsourced, for the time being, the achieving of that larger, civilisationally retrograde goal of establishing an Islamic Caliphate in the Middle-East, to the ISIS. The symptoms are all similar; the difference lies only in the expressions, says Dr Anirban Ganguly.
The e-commerce sector gave a much higher average hike of 16-20 per cent to its executives.
BJP chief Amit Shah said that the government has brought the country out of policy paralysis.
Pakistan on Saturday accused the US of deliberately trying to sabotage its peace process with militants by carrying out the drone attack that killed Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud, saying it would review the entire gamut of bilateral ties and cooperation.
The time the companies have to get ready for GST is 6 to 12 months.
Internet users in India is attracting cyber criminals, as these are first-timers, who can be duped easily
A glance back at some important events that occurred in 2018.
'Tibet remains a prickly issue between the giant Asian nations. China still claims more than 80,000 sq kilometres of Indian territory in the Northeast. Why? Just because Beijing refuses to acknowledge the McMahon line which separates India and Tibet, and this, simply because the 1914 Agreement delineating the border was signed by the then government of independent Tibet with India's then foreign secretary (Sir Henry McMahon),' says Claude Arpi.
'The provisions of the AFSPA must remain on the statute books given the increasingly violent and uncertain times.'
Playing down recent border stand off in Ladakh ahead of Premier Li Keqiang's visit to India, China on Thursday said the two sides have the ability to prevent such issues from affecting overall growth of ties, while working "very hard" to find a solution at an "early date".
'We're going to see a defence relationship that really takes off -- now that India is a major defence partner of the US, the sky is the limit for arms sales.' 'The economic partnership will lag behind the security relationship, but the meeting and joint statement give cause to believe that it will progress more robustly than many of us would have expected.'
The fiscal deficit of the Centre remains a worry, running at over 6.5 per cent of GDP in April-September 2014, mainly because of revenue shortfalls from exaggerated projections in the government's July Budget and despite the relief on subsidies from lower oil prices.
India's enemies be warned: The Rafale deal will bring a sea change in India's defence preparedness.
The AgustaWestland issue was fiercely debated in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday with members of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress blaming each other.
'The stereotype of an actress is that she's dumb, somebody who will sit on your lap, giggle on stupid jokes, come to the van when she's being called, receive a call at 3am and come over to your house. So when a girl comes along and challenges this, people get uncomfortable.'
'I have seen in action six prime ministers and ten chief ministers, considered stalwarts in their days, and it is the first time, in all my experience, that a prime minister has gone into such great detail, laying down even the standards of cleanliness that should be maintained in all offices,' says B S Raghavan, former chief secretary, West Bengal.
The President talked about demonetisation, electoral reforms and disruptions in Parliament.
Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian's interview.
The government has taken a number of steps to address the situation faced by farmers.
In the first part of an exclusive interview with Sheela Bhatt/Rediff.com on the eve of the first year of the Narendra Modi-led NDA government, BJP President Amit Shah talks about the government's achievements and the controversy over the land ordinance.
James Wilson tracks down discrepancies in the much-hailed demonetisation policy and the subsequent statements of the government and the Reserve Bank of India.
The full transcript of the exclusive interview with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
'If you destroy the assets in Pathankot, you degrade the combat potential of India; you degrade the war potential of India.'
The verdict could impact a range of life choices of Indians, including food habits and sexual orientation.
An airport in Noida could lead to higher user fees and diversion of traffic from Delhi, which has huge unused capacity.
Rahul Gandhi thinks his imaginary Congress is the silver bullet; Narendra Modi thinks he himself is the silver bullet; Arvind Kejriwal seems to think that neighbourhood councils are a silver bullet. But none of them is right, says Mihir S Sharma.
Govt says coastal road is meant to decongest Mumbai, experts believe it would be counter-productive.
'After Rajan is back in India, our resident dons are almost down. I won't say that they are out. So, now the obvious question is about Dawood, and the present government, I think, is more than willing to address that issue.' 'I think the political system made this kind of people; the corporate world made this kind of people. I have mentioned in my book that even the banks were using these outlaws to get their money back.'
'Do you know there is a 500 page report prepared by an inquiry committee headed by myself? When I placed the report in Parliament, have you heard any single Opposition leader give a notice for discussion? Why are they not demanding a discussion in Parliament on the report? They could have established that there was a scam. Today, a Parliament Committee report is as good as a Parliament report and this report says the 2G scam is no scam. Our government is suffering because of the media hype on these scams,' Congress MP P C Chacko tells Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier.
While Congress-ruled states such as Kerala, Karnataka and Assam expressed fears about the sudden demise of the planning process and wondered what it would be replaced with, also worrying about the immediate implications on annual Plan outlays, Andhra Pradesh said it was considering setting up its own NITI Aayog.
Maharashtra Finance Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar speaks to Prasanna Zore/Rediff.com.
But he is actively pursuing greenfield steel plants in Karnataka and Jharkhand; ultimately, only one of these might come up.
