Shekhar Gupta has a question for Kanhaiya Kumar, but a bigger, more vital, one for the honourable judge.
What Shekhar Gupta would have really liked to know from Pranabda: Why did Sonia prefer Dr Singh to him as PM? Why did he deny finance first, why did he accept it 5 years later, and why did he make such a mess of it? How did he force Sonia to nominate him for President and not Hamid Ansari? And how does he justify that most toxic legacy -- the Vodafone tax amendment?
Shekhar Chakravarty has developed and patented Curvo -- world's first non-linear ropeway system.
Aseem Chhabra lists the movies that taught him about the Idea of India.
Paytm is just embarking on building a TaoBao like entity in India, it may want to address a challenge that the latter faced a few years after its launch.
If you don't have power in a game you are masters of, the world will walk all over you, notes Shekhar Gupta.
'That the commandments to officialdom were issued by a BJP functionary and not a minister is a reflection of the Yogi government's work style.'
'In this resurgent India, class is the new caste. We are shaken up only occasionally, and briefly, when a battered, tribal teenager from Jharkhand looks us in the eye from our closet,' says Shekhar Gupta.
'Usually, the Left backed the Congress and other 'secular' parties on the justification of keeping the BJP out. In Bengal, the alliance targets a truly secular rival,' says Shekhar Gupta.
'You can see the essential contours of his new Pakistan strategy. Rather than keep engaging with or humouring them, he'd rather work on taking their four biggest supporters -- the US, China, the UAE and later Saudi Arabia -- away from them.' 'In his calculation,' says Shekhar Gupta, 'with the total support of all four of these, Pakistan will be forced to moderate its policies.'
Considering that all sides to the game feel being targeted by the BJP-ruled Centre through taxmen and their ED/CBI counterparts, both factions may not rule out the possibility of patching up after a time, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
There are perks for banking with the newest bank in India.
'The category of crime and criminals called Maoist or Naxal or #UrbanNaxals is an illegitimate creation of right-wing propaganda media frenzy.' 'It is a fiction repugnant to the Constitution and the law of the land,' argue Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira.
'His Promised Land was India.' Shekhar Gupta salutes General J F R Jacob, the incredible soldier who passed into the ages this week.
Using a sledgehammer to fix some ills can cut down a game at its peak, warns Shekhar Gupta.
Happy New Year is watchable in parts but its three hours and plus running time makes it woefully difficult.
'Nobody would dare directly target Modi, and while there are murmurs about Amit Shah after Bihar, nobody is willing to say this openly. Arun Jaitley, in some calculations, is most expendable for Modi,' says Shekhar Gupta.
Modi has the ideas for a new, hopeful India, and an idiom in which to sell optimism to voters. But he doesn't yet have the team for it, and soon enough, questions will begin to be asked by an impatient, non-ideological, I-don't-owe-anybody-anything generation of Indian voters, says Shekar Gupta.
'Openness is a great weapon in the armoury of more open societies. That's why the fight with Pakistan isn't just about India be six times bigger, but equally bitter and insecure Pakistan,' argues Shekhar Gupta.
Ma and the other co-founders had finalised the name "Alibaba" after much research on its acceptability.
And no, the commercial sporting leagues didn't cause the drought, says Shekhar Gupta.
Abusers on social media will be rewarded if you just got intimidated or even minimally distracted. If you don't let the noise make you do either, you are winning, without even fighting the battle, says Shekhar Gupta.
'No country can go from zero to hero at the Olympics.' 'A hundred Indians now feature in the world's top 25 and that's progress,' says Shekhar Gupta.
'Their failure to take Siachen is an embarrassment to the Pakistan army -- and let them live with it. Our army's shoulders are broad enough to endure the challenge.'
Vikramank Singh looks back at the year gone by!
The real brilliance of this RSS campaign, therefore, lies in building a dominant power base with, and for, a mostly non-RSS leadership. That is why the rise of the BJP in Assam is their stand-out victory, says Shekhar Gupta.
'Lending to Mr Mallya was the bankers' season ticket to corridors of power and glamour. Borrowing from them was like a favour Mallya did to them,' says Shekhar Gupta.
What got the Jats of Haryana so furious?
'The Ishrat encounter was neither genuine, nor fake. I believe it was a 'controlled killing,' says Shekhar Gupta.
Does Pranab Mukherjee want to be 'PM' by office, not just by initials? The very prospect, with memories of the Narasimha Rao years scarred into their memories, scares the Nehru-Gandhis, says T V R Shenoy.
'The Congress, all these decades, worked on a slow Hindi-isation and Indianisation of Arunachal tribes. The RSS wants rapid Hinduisation,' says Shekhar Gupta.
'This is an emotional issue and cannot be resolved by law alone.' 'This can be resolved only by creating trust again.' 'So much bloodletting has taken place, there is no point in going on and on.' 'Let us sit together and negotiate'
'That night -- when Gandhi won Best Picture at the 1983 Oscars -- belonged to India and it meant a lot to a young student like me, who was trying to establish his Indian identity among the Americans around him.' Aseem Chhabra/Rediff.com, who worked as an extra on Richard Attenborough's acclaimed biopic, salutes the late legend.
.jpg)
'Both resisted cruel white rule through non-violence. But Mandela's is a singular story. He never lost faith in his ideals and goal even when he was in prison for many years,' Anant Singh, who produced the Mandela biopic, tells Rediff.com's Arthur J Pais.
'We look and say their life is so tragic.' 'But there are hundreds of millions of people in these circumstances and what can they do but to carry on.'
The families of the Muslim youth from Hashimpura who were shot dead 28 years ago had some committed supporters in their long struggle for justice.
'Competition makes us better. I lose a little bit of sleep because I have competition.'
The biggest success of Nawaz Sharif's visit to India is that it will lessen mistrust between the two countries, writes Amir Mateen from Islamabad.
Music composer-singer Bappi Lahiri offers a sneak peek into what to expect in his US concerts this month.
The project is awaiting clearances from the DGCA.
