Your agitation against Shah Rukh Khan, Rahul Gandhi, Mukesh Ambani and Sachin Tendulkar turned out to be as riveting as a deflating balloon. Nobody paid heed to your leader’s call, least of all we Bombay /Manoos /who you have turned into a kind of experimental guinea pigs in the political laboratory. What kind of wishy-washy, spineless, sloppy fellows are you! Sorry, Mr Shiv Sainik, the nation did not want an apology from SRK – far from it. They just want good, edge-of-the-seat cricket.

Ek Marathi Manoos shares a letter from his colleague, the Stupid Common Man written to the Thackeray family and Shiv Sainiks.

The attacks also come at a time when India and Pakistan are scheduled to begin their first round of talks at the Foreign Secretary level, starting February 25.  The talks were offered by India at the prodding of Washington, which wants to be seen as being sensitive to Pakistan’s India-paranoia, as US begins its largest military operations against the Taliban since 2001 in Marja.
So what must India’s response be?

The Filter Coffee at Indian National Interest advises decision makers on what India’s response ought to be in the aftermath of the Pune terror attacks.

Dr. Manmohan Singh’s daughter Prof. Upinder Singh won an Infosys Prize. Churumuri digs through in search of propriety in the episode, a missing element.

While all that is commendable and unquestionable, the question remains: was only Upinder Singh worthy of this singular honour in this, the first year of the Infosys Prize?

Even if Indian CEOs were paid obscene salaries, and Indians resented this, and Salman Khurshid wasn’t a sanctimonious arsehole living off the public trough, this is India, where we outperform the rest of the world when it comes to innovation in corruption and fiddling accounts.

Aadisht finds Salman Khurshid’s recent crusade against CEO pay baffling considering Indian CEO salaries are hardly topic of outrage in India.

Q Auntyji, what is Advaniji’s contribution to Indian politics? – RSP

Dear RSP, Advaniji will be remembered as a man who got on a chariot and spent months galvanizing the masses to do something that took him entirely by surprise.

The agony aunt at Noise of India counsels BJP.

In response to Manoj Joshi’s post criticizing Dr. Abdul Kalam, Chandra Dulam writes:

That Kalam was the stumbling block for development of missile weapons systems doesn’t hold water to reality. And that somehow we should use the delays in development and deployment of missiles to point out the failing of Kalam holds even less water. Those were purely political decisions. Kalam’s call for indigenous development of missile weapon systems was the right call and it enhanced, rather than imperiled, national security. In fact, he prodded his scientists to think outside the conventional box such as, for example, thinking about reusable missiles.

Ted Kennedy passed away today, the third-longest serving member of the Senate in history, and a man who affected the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans. In a family of public servants, he perhaps did the most for our country of any of the Kennedy brothers, and he certainly made a profound impact in almost all of our lives, as immigrants and the descendants of immigrants. Most notably in civil rights and immigration, but also in practically every other walk of life, he has affected the lives of South Asian immigrants.”

Ravi at Sepia Mutiny highlights the contribution of Ted Kennedy to the welfare of South Asian immigrants.

India’s Youth Affairs and Sports ministry has now officially ruled that Formula 1 racing or F1 is not sports. The ministry’s ruling came in response to a private promoter’s request for about $36 million remittance for a license fee payment…

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Greatbong discusses the historical (de)merits of Jaswant Singh’s controversial new book on Jaswant Singh,

So what Jaswant Singh is saying that all Jinnah wanted was a little “space” and Nehru with his Western European ideal of a “nation state” with strong notions of centralization refused to give him that leeway and this is what led to partition. The logical conclusion that Jaswant Singh makes is that a decentralized federal India based on religion would have been a “solution” (a Pakistan within an India as he says), something that Nehru refused to accept. If only he had.[link]

This abrupt expulsion however, smacks of an increasingly insecure leadership in the BJP that is keen to preserve the status quo and prolong its spell in power. The party is likely to lurch from one controversy to the other till the time a new generation of charismatic leadership is allowed to emerge. Jaswant Singh in the meantime has all the time in the world to write. 

Vijay Vikram writes about the recent controversy regarding Jaswant Singh’s expulsion from BJP.