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Chandan Saurav Mitra, or CS as some of his old friends called him, would have turned 67 on 12 December had he not left us. From academics he turned to journalism and then, politics. He had an amazingly-wide range of interests: from Bollywood film songs to international politics. He was incredibly bright and intelligent, had a sharp wit and sense of repartee. He was exceptionally alert till the last few months of his life when his memory started failing. He enjoyed all the best things of life...

It was on March 17 that I received an unexpected call from Chennai-based investigative journalist Sandhya Ravishankar. She said she was flying into Delhi that evening and had to meet me most urgently the following day. I told her I was travelling and the only time I could possibly keep aside for her would be early in the morning at 6am. Why the urgency, I asked. After all, we had not been in touch for a while since a meeting of the Foundation for Media Professionals. “I’ll tell you when we meet...

It is 46 years since Indira Gandhi declared an ‘internal’ Emergency in the country on June 25, 1975. There are obvious dissimilarities between that 21-month period and the last seven years — but the similarities are so stark as to warrant repeated reiteration. How did we reach this particular point in our political life that we had so unequivocally rejected less than half-a-century ago? The Emergency certainly taught Indira Gandhi that she had completely misread the democratic commitment of the...

In his complaint, Peter Kerkar also highlighted the links that exist between SSG Capital and Redkite Capital. He denies involvement in any fraudulent activity and claims that Ezeego’s management began an internal investigation into its operations and finances by appointing the firm of chartered accountants, Desai Saxena and Associates, to carry out an audit of the company’s finances. According to his complaint, he and his sister Urrshila own 41.26% of the shares in the company, Coad Management...

The Tourism Finance Corporation of India (TFCI) is a financial institution set up in 1989 by a group of financial institutions and public sector banks, including the Industrial Finance Corporation of India (IFCI), the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), the Oriental Insurance Corporation (OIC), State Bank of India, Bank of India and Canara Bank. According to TFCI’s website, it has assisted in the establishment of “one third of the total capacity of branded hotels in India.” The stake of...

He used to have a prominent profile, a flamboyant lifestyle. He was a frequent flier between Mumbai and London. His father once headed the hotels division of the Tata group before he fell out with Ratan Tata in 1997. He graduated from Stanford University in the United States. He used to run a travel agency that was supposed to be the oldest of its kind in the world, set up in 1758, a year after the British established control over large parts of India following their victory in the Battle of...

Did the businessman in Bob Dylan supersede the poet Did he demur before writing down an essay (instead of delivering the mandatory speech) before pocketing the equivalent of $900,000 or nearly ₹7 crore from the Nobel Academy We will never know the answers simply because he never will tell Dylan will continue to refuse to be classified **** A troubadour with a twang; an Amriki baul; an icon of his generation; a bundle of contradictions who steadfastly refused to be stereotyped; who relentlessly...

The outcome of the ongoing elections to the West Bengal legislative assembly will have important implications for the working of not just the state’s polity but on the future of democracy in India. If the Bharatiya Janata Party is able to come to power for the first time in Bengal, there will be no stopping Narendra Modi’s relentless drive to create an Opposition- mukt Bharat and his unabashed endeavour to establish what can best be described as an ‘electoral autocracy’ in the country. Even if...

Half a century ago, long before artificial intelligence became a commonly-used phrase, well before computers were used not just to predict electoral outcomes but human behaviour as well, decades before Google, Facebook, Amazon and Cambridge Analytica became household names and giant conglomerates started exercising an overweening influence on what more than half the population of the planet read, heard and watched, there used to exist a corporation called Simulmatics in the United States of...

Gurugram: Less than a month after Suvendu Adhikari, former Trinamool Congress (TMC) Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) of West Bengal from Nandigram, joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, other TMC leaders have become increasingly vocal in expressing their unhappiness and frustrations with the functioning of the ruling party in the state led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, and are apparently preparing the ground to join BJP in the run...