How did people like Sudhakar Dwivedi alias Dayanand Pandey become shankaracharyas?

Swami Amritanand Devtirtha Maharaj – lately reduced to being just Dayanand Pandey -- is currently in the custody of the Mumbai Anti-terror Squad (ATS) on the charge of engineering explosions outside a religious place in Malegaon, Maharashtra that killed six persons.

A shankaracharya is the equivalent of a Pope. And TSI’s enquiries in several religious places, including Kashi in Varanasi, reveal a highly sordid state of affairs. Rankings like mahanth, mahamandleshwar, acharya and even shankaracharya are up for sale. But now, with the ATS digging into Dwivedi’s past and interrogating the Varanaseya Vidvat Parishad office-bearers who crowned him shankaracharya on May 16, 2003, things are bound to change.

Says Batuk Prasad Shastri, general secretary of the Kashi Vidvat Parishad (KVP): “Adi Shankaracharya (788-820 AD) founded four seats about 1200 years ago for the spread of Hindu culture -- Jyotishpeeth in Badrinath (North), Shringeripeeth in Chikmagalur district of Karnataka (South), Shardapeeth at Dwarka (West) and Govardhanpeeth at Puri (East). There are, besides, two sub-seats -- Kashipeeth (Uttar Pradesh) where the first Shankaracharya lived and Kanchi Kamkoti (Tamil Nadu) where he died. There can’t be any other peeth. All the other peeths and shankaracharyas are fake.”...Continue

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Blackout in the parched Fields

Siddaveerappa shudders at the thought of a long, dark winter ahead. With massive power shortage plaguing Karnataka, power supply has dwindled to a paltry two to three hours a day. This means farmers like Siddaveerappa – most of whom use pump sets and bore wells – have no water to irrigate their land, which translates into a diminished agricultural yield and perhaps loss of livelihood. Despite numerous assurances of the government, the power situation is yet to improve.

“Our yield is decreasing by the day and we don’t even have seeds to sow in the next season. The kharif (monsoon) crop yield was paltry due to shortage of rain, but now even the rabi (winter) crop will be ruined due to these long and frequent load sheddings. If it continues like this, we won’t even have enough crop to feed ourselves,” rues Siddaveerappa from Holalkere, Chitradurga, where farmers like him depend largely on rain-fed crops. The failure of kharif crop has left them with very less seeds to sow. Now with long power cuts cutting into their supply of irrigational water, the future appears bleak.....Continue

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Thank god it's recession!

GLOBAL ECONOMY : IMPACT ON INDIA

With banks in the US and Europe tumbling like ninepins and with the recession setting in in America and elsewhere, the central banks of most of the key economies in the world are on a war footing to infuse more liquidity, reduce interest rates and arrest the global enonomic downslide. In India too, the Rsserve Bank of India has been trying its best to weather the vagaries of global recession. Yet in the hindsight, amidst all the showering of bad news by pink newspapers of job cuts, pay cuts and the erosion of wealth of Indian billionaires, one wonders if it is really such a time of despair or that this recession is ideally a boon in disguise for countries like India and its common men. Consider this: even a few months back, when international oil prices were hovering in the region of $140-$150 a barrel, inflation in India was literally leapfrogging. Indian oil companies on account of their under-recovery from retail sale of oil were bleeding to death and were facing an estimated loss of a staggering a Rs two lakh crore by the end of current financial year. Thanks to the looming recession in the US and Europe, international oil prices have literally collapsed to the region of $55-$65 a barrel, thus saving Indian oil PSUs from the chances of bankruptcy. Accepted that retail price of oil has not yet come down, but that the oil-PSUs have started making profit and there is reduction of under-recoveries is news good enough, as no economy in the long run is sustainable if for cushioning the masses from volatile international prices, its blue-chip companies become bankrupt. That possibility is gone now. Lower oil prices also guarantees faster growth of Indian economy....Continue

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That guttural sound, could it be a leopard? That distant yipping… did the wild dogs make a kill?”

We sat silently in the vehicle for almost 10 minutes. In the near distance we could hear a rustling as a soft, yet biting wind fanned our faces. It was cold. Above us a full moon lit the night sky and ahead of us I imagined I saw something move. Someone shifted and it seemed the creaking of metal plates would be heard in distant Nagpur. That was when I saw them in the frame of my night vision binoculars. There were four tigers walking towards us in single file. Cats see well in the dark and they must have heard us ages ago, but they were unafraid. They seemed as curious about us as we were about them! Within seconds they settled all around us like so many household cats, safe in the knowledge that we meant them no harm.


There can be no better place to escape to than the exquisite Himalayan havens to be found in Kashmir, Ladakh, Garhwal, Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh. One of my abiding sorrows is the fact that for long years it was not safe to trek through Kashmir. I have often walked up 2,000 metres through the famous oak forests of the Dachigam Sanctuary near Srinagar. Home of the last surviving herds of hangul deer, it seems difficult to imagine that so much blood has been shed in the beautiful Kashmir valley. I remember my trip to the Great Himalayan National Park in Himachal Pradesh. A bird had made several sorties from its fragile perch on the thin creeper to the trickle of water oozing from a green grotto that had been carved by nature out of hard rock....Continue

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The Princess

Despite her impulsive behaviour, Benazir Bhutto was a ray of hope for all those who cherish a democratic polity in Pakistan. She braved imprisonment and exile and her charisma attracted the downtrodden and the elite alike. She was no doubt like a princess and went away like a martyr.

I remember when Benazir Bhutto arrived in Pakistan in 1986 after self-exile in Britain, she drew huge crowds in many cities of Pakistan including Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan. The province was traditionally dominated by nationalist Baloch veterans like Nawab Khair Bux Marri, Sardar Ataullah Mengal and Ghous Bux Bizenjo.

When military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq perished in a mysterious air crash on August 17, 1988, along with several top generals and the then US ambassador in Pakistan, Bhutto was the only alternative for a demoralised army. She was also a source of strength for thousands of political activists in Pakistan who were imprisoned, tortured and even flogged by the military dictator who ruled the country for 11 long years through sheer force and demagogy.

There was euphoria in the masses when she again arrived in Pakistan in 1988. Upon hearing the news that Bhutto had swept the elections, I remember common men and women had danced in the streets, distributed sweets and prostrated before God. However, her brother Mir Murtaza Bhutto, who was brutally murdered in a police shootout during the second tenure of Bhutto, believed otherwise. He thought Bhutto had made a compromise with the establishment since she agreed that Ghulam Ishaq Khan would continue as president and Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, Foreign Minister during the Zia era, would continue in the same capacity.....Continue

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Here’s Tareque Laskar's story on the subtle subterfuge of how the Indian bowling attack grew its fangs.

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We’ve had the fab four for a good part of the last decade and some more but the results and wins (especially away) have started trickling in the past half a decade since that historic series in Australia back in 2003. Think about the win at Adelaide (and Zaheer’s burst that preceded it in a rain hit Brisbane Test that ended in draw but set the tone for the titanic tussles to follow), the one at Headingly, at Trent Bridge or the one at Perth and the pattern is hard to miss. There’s a quiet revolution that has swept cricket academies in India in the recent past, and it has nothing to do with batsmen spending hours in the nets protecting their wickets to win a one rupee coin at the end of the day. A new breed of Indian bowler – mentally and physically – is taking shape. The hard work and toil of people like T A Sekar at the MRF Pace Foundation and bowling coach Venkatesh Prasad has resulted in greater cognizance the impact bowlers can have on a team’s fortunes. Prasad, himself a lanky exception amidst dozens of turners and trundlers, has been “One of the reasons of the success of this Indian bowling contingent” says one time teammate Srinath. “I think credit should be given to Prasad who has worked very well behind the scenes to bring some meaning into the fast bowling department” he adds. And the number of different bowlers who have done their bit in the last year or so is even more heartening. Two of them, Munaf Patel (who won India his debut test against England) and R P Singh (who bowled brilliantly in England and then Australia) have watched this current series from the sidelines. The fact remains that a pool of bowlers of top caliber is competing for spots, a luxury Indian cricket has never before afforded. The day when a kid picks up a ball and says ‘I want to be the next Ishant’ doesn’t seem too far off and the joke about the lack of Indian fast bowlers is currently on the teams and batsmen that have been tormented by Zaheer, Ishant and Co. Says Srinath, “In the last 3-4 years there has been a sudden burst in fast bowlers in India, especially the good ones… Zaheer Khan has found his line and length back and he has been a more responsible bowler and the leader of the pack, then Ishant Sharma has been doing extremely well and I think he is the best news for Indian cricket.” No wonder, during the Mohali test, Australian commentator Glenn Mitchell remarked on ABC that Ishant is the ‘best fast bowler in the world right now’.

Srinath thinks that “spin has been our forte and now the fast bowlers have found their footing and our bowling (attack) is one of the most potent in the world!” The fine balance the attack has achieved has been the prime reason. India has always suffered from a skew towards spin but as Srinath points out that “there is a good balance between the spinners and the fast bowlers and they are working in tandem.” And he labels it “one of the finest balanced bowling attacks in the world.” Former Indian fast bowler Atul Wassan suggests the following strategy “when we tour abroad, then we (typically) play with three seamers and one spinner. I hope Amit Mishra can potentially carry on the same way… we would have Zaheer!....Continue

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