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How Political Science is a stepping stone to becoming a global citizen April 12, 2021, 5:43 PM IST Shahnaaz Khan is Faculty, Political Science, Head of Department, Humanities at Shiv Nadar School, Noida Politics can sometimes seem the anathema of our times. With connotations such as graft and greed, the ability of politics to create resilient, equal and peaceful societies seems to be lost upon us. Even the Political Science NCERT textbook for Grade XI spends a part of its initial chapter explaining why politics has such a bad rap, and why that needs to change. How then can the study of politics help change its image and create purposeful and participative citizens? ....
Why Cong must lead the charge on abolishing sedition law April 11, 2021, 7:28 AM IST Dear Rahul Your recent statement that “democracy is dead” created the expected hullabaloo. Not surprisingly, the BJP ridiculed your justifiable solicitude at India’s slipping global image of becoming an illiberal democracy. They trashed the US-based Freedom House report that said we were partly-free, and the Swedish V-Democratic Institute findings which said India was like an elected autocracy. The government’s response was boilerplate: This was mere left-leaning vacuous intellectualism, jaundiced at its core. Fact is that the new global political model uses electoral triumphs to undermine civil liberties. Presidents Erdogan, Putin, Viktor Orban, Roger Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro have gradually converted democratic systems into an autocratic architecture. Modern-day societies do not need earth-shattering legislations to announce their new freedom strangulating ava ....
Back in 2008, when people still did brunches and struck deals while hobnobbing in business class, artist Sudarshan Shetty bumped into real estate tycoon Manish Maker on a flight. The young Maker who well understands. ....
Why Ist April is observed as April Fools’ Day and other recollections April 1, 2021, 11:50 AM IST The writer is former Deputy Surveyor General, Survey of India and currently president of All India Consumer Council, Uttarakhand and Vice-President of Cheshire Home, Dehradun, and Doon Citizen Council LESS. MORE April Fools’ Day, also called All Fools’ Day, is celebrated every year on April 1 by playing practical jokes and planting hoaxes on friends, neighbours or other close associates but ensuring that no harm is done to them all in the spirit of fun. The victims of the jokes are called April Fools. People playing April Fool jokes expose their prank by shouting ‘April Fool’ immediately after the person realises that the joke has been played. ....
Was it more than a tale of the unexpected? Let us see what was it? March 17, 2021, 4:04 PM IST A true story of real people involving high dignitaries playing to explosively high stakes. First let us see, who were those front-ranking people, involved in this high-stake project. There were at least 6 of them that need to be mentioned. There were so many others but we will have no space to include them. They were: Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, the Chief Marshall Law Administrator of Pakistan, freshly appointed at the end of the highly toxic India Pakistan War of 1971; Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the newly crowned Father of the Nation of Bangladesh, who was still in military custody in Rawalpindi serving a death sentence handed down by Pakistan’s Military Tribunal; ....