• Sanjay Kaul’s Weblog : Inspirational

    Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will. - Frederick Douglass

The Namonation of a PM

Now that Narendra Modi has been nominated as the BJP’s PM candidate, and of what will eventually be the NDA, there still remains the luxurious and infinitely pleasurable pursuit of trying to pick a bone with it.  I recount a TV anchor on a show, sometime back,  wagging his finger vigorously in my face asking … Continue reading

Elections 2014: What the opinion polls foretell.

Two forecasts for the 2014 general election indicate a denuded mandate for the Congress and an emphatic advantage for the BJP. Still, many would like to believe it has nothing to do with Modi.   Going by the spate of opinion polls about election outcomes one would believe that elections are already upon us. Going … Continue reading

Aam Aadmi goes to Party!

It might come as a jolt to prime time TV junkies who like their revolutions outsourced, but there are solid reasons why the newly constituted Aam Aadmi Party is destined to oblivion -and discover that electoral politics is no party!   As a fervent advocate of community action, I have witnessed with growing disappointment the … Continue reading

Hang the Gang – the Rape and the Mob.

The shocking incident of gang rape in India’s capital is what it is but there is another blood thirsty gang of people out there that insist on picking the wrong things to learn from this incident. The headless chicken-ry around the grotesque case of the gang rape in Delhi has reached its nadir. Opinions have … Continue reading

The vote on FDI- the knaves have it!

The vote on FDI in retail in Parliament only showed us what we always knew – the knaves have it, the knaves have it! By the time it went to vote in the Lok Sabha, it had become clear that the public discourse on the issue of FDI in multi-brand retail was compromised to such … Continue reading

Old whine, new battles!

 First there was the big bang theory, that held that a nation can be distracted from humongous corruption by reform-sounding economic steps. Close on its heels comes the second flanking move – a self congratulatory reshuffle which, bereft of a plausible plan, seems like old wine in new bottles. If the measure of popularity is … Continue reading

Coalgate: The Promise of a Toothache.

Solid grounds exist to implicate the Prime Minister of India in the bungling in the coal sector while he was Minister. Now, if only we would stop harping on the virtual loss and instead focus on the virtual absence of responsibility and control that the PM exhibited, we might just get the country to see … Continue reading

It’s the economist, Stupid!

The Indian economy was held up as a beacon of hope in the time that the international crisis began but it looks like we have manufactured our very own crisis. This post argues that the Indian economy’s problems arise out of the Congress’ leadership dichotomy and a fanatical obsession with retaining power – even at the expense … Continue reading

BJP and the price of difference.

In a season when the fruit should have been ready for the picking, how come everyone, including party members think that the BJP is not perceived as a natural alternative to the Congress? This post proposes that it might have to do with a self-inflicted wound – and asks the party to stop trying to … Continue reading