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Point, Counterpoint

Today’s Hindu newspaper carries a number of articles on the one year of Mr Modi as Prime Minister. Except the one BJP supporter, none of the other writers has anything good to say about the year that India passed through.  I found it an interesting exercise to take the major arguments of the BJP spokesman, Ravi Shankar Prasad, and rebut them with the arguments given by the other writers.  Here’s a discussion I fabricated out of the views expressed by the four writers.   Ravi Shankar Prasad R S Prasad : In just a span of 12 months, the NDA government has succeeded in restoring India’s image as a fast-growing economy . Sitaram Yechuri: The statistical base year for national income accounts has been changed in order to project the GDP growth rate in better light.  Despite this, it is clear that the manufacturing and industrial growth are just not taking off. Prasad: The government’s priority is the poor and the marginalised . Sitaram Yechuri Yechuri : The sha

Paroxysms of Truth

Proceed at your own risk “I contend that there are no whole truths , there are only pertinent truths – and pertinence, you must agree, is always a matter of perspective .” The quote is from the arduous novel that won the Booker Prize last year, The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton.  The emphases are added by this author who is still plodding through the novel one week after he started reading it. When Mr Narendra Modi, the Emperor of the South Asian Region, invited the whole Luminaries of the (defunct) SAARC continent to his coronation ceremony, truth began to wiggle and wriggle in my solar plexus until it became a paroxysm.   I had decided to ignore politics in my writing.  But my new Prime Minister won’t let me do it, it seems.  He is the actor par excellence.  Nobody in Indian politics will ever outshine him in histrionics, I am quite sure. Robert Graves may be inspired to resurrect himself from his grave to write yet another sequel to his unparalleled novel, I, Cl