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Read my lips
A few months ago, the Parliament of India produced a spectacularly vacant Agenda for India to mark the fiftieth anniversary of independence. This resolution ranged lightly over challenges that India has grappled with for the best part of fifty years by promising primary education for all by 2005, drastic electoral reform, the end of criminality in politics, and a direction that the "economy be prudently managed". This hollow grandstanding has now met its match in a similarly vacuous manifesto by the United Front.
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Crucial cures
After a long time, there's some good news on the leprosy front. The National Institute of Immunology's new anti-leprosy vaccine, could not have come at a more opportune moment. Statistics have revealed that leprosy, which is really a pre-modern disease and should have, like small-pox, been completely eradicated by now, continues to cause concern in countries like India.
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Of betrayal and bungling
Lieutenant General A. A. K. Niazi is probably the last among commanders of Pakistani forces in East Pakistan in the Bangladesh war to write on what led to the surrender of Dhaka. In The Betrayal of East Pakistan he says Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and General Yahya Khan "hatched a conspiracy" to lose East Pakistan. He says the government did not go to the UN Security Council straight away to give India time to win the encounter and attacks Bhutto for not pressing friendly countries in the UN to negotiate a ceasefire.
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Vote for policies, not gender
Although most political parties have only marginally increased the number of their women candidates in the forthcoming elections, the issue of one-third reservations for women in Parliament and legislatures cannot be ignored. In contrast to the last elections when it had been confined to a mention in manifestoes, this time leaders are having to refer to the issue in their public speeches and commit themselves to passage of the Bill.
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All fair and square
We were in the midst of a birthday celebration when Peder reached our floor, key in one hand and a soft-top suitcase in the other, looking for his room. Tall, lithe and radiant, very nifty, with a crew cut, he spoke good English for a Dane. Friendly and articulate, he shared a cup of ice-cream, refusing our offer of lunch. This was Peder Harbjerg Nielson, the professor flown in from Denmark's Aarhus School of Business to teach us Financial Management from scratch and make us exam-ready in a fortnight.
Only the masses count
Every year around this week, a dazzling array of Washington's high and mighty, rich and famous gather for black tie dinner hosted at the Capitol Hilton by the snooty Alfalfa Club, an event that is always graced by the President of the US. Not this President. And not this year. In the most resounding snub delivered to America's elite, President Clinton on Saturday ignored the power dinner and political tattle and chose instead to holiday at Camp David with his daughter Chelsea.
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