Dr Sanjaya Baru, editor, Business Standard, talks about the lack of respect for education and the need to reward excellence.
Dr Sanjaya Baru answered our readers' questions on the Union Budget on February 28.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh continues to be unwell, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee has postponed his visit to Australia by a day and Communist Party of India-Marxist General Secretary Prakash Karat has warned that the Left will withdraw support to the United Progressive Alliance government by Wednesday if the UPA continues to pursue the India-US nuclear deal.
H Y Sharada Prasad, freedom fighter, columnist and the speech writer of three Prime Ministers of India, passed away in New Delhi on Tuesday. Dr Sanjaya Baru, former media advisor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, remembers the man who was famous for a book that he never wrote.
Dr Baru and Dr Singh struck up a close relationship when the latter was finance minister in 1991; in fact, when Dr Singh resigned from Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao's Cabinet over the stock exchange scam in the 1990s, it was Dr Baru who broke the story.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday returned to his residence at 7, Race Course Road from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences where he had undergone a surgery.
The Congress is nervous about the PM penning his memoirs.
Say hello to the cast of The Accidental Prime Minister.
'Given his stint in Beijing, as India's longest serving ambassador there and that too through some challenging and interesting times, Jaishankar ought to have been appointed as foreign secretary in 2013 itself,' says Sanjaya Baru.
'People have a certain perception about my political leanings -- and rightly so.' 'But I am an actor first, and then an activist.' 'And I am not an accidental actor.' 'There was no way I was going to be dishonest with my acting,' Anupam Kher tells Veenu Sandhu.
'Prime Minister Manmohan Singh refused to allow us to project his real personality to let the people of India know exactly what he really was. He was always shying away from greater public exposure. Since the last two years we have seen enormous criticism, ridiculing the prime minister. He has been made into an object of jokes. It certainly hurts. I think this man deserves lots of good reviews... His contribution to social policy, his contribution to the economy, his contribution to coalition management, his contribution to foreign policy.' Dr Sanjaya Baru, Dr Singh's former media advisor who is in the eye of a storm over his book on the prime minister UPA speaks to Rediff.com's Sheela Bhatt.
'People, who are objecting to the movie now, should have objected in 2014 when the book came out. But nobody did.'
'While they were respectful of the PM, it was clear that as ministers, they owed their positions as much, if not more, to Mrs Gandhi.' 'When attacks were mounted on the PM, there was very little coordinated effort by the Congress, UPA ministers or other politicians to speak up in his favour and strongly defend him.' B K Chaturvedi, Cabinet Secretary during the early years of UPA1, reveals how the Manmohan Singh-Sonia Gandhi equation worked. A riveting excerpt from Chaturvedi's memoir, Challenges Of Governance: An Insider's View
We suffered worse political degradation during the Emergency. But we emerged resurgent and vigorous because the spirit was not broken. This time around, we face an imminent threat to it, says Shreekant Sambrani