Dil Se

Last week, a young man who did good to many he didn’t even know, died in a tragic, unexplained road accident in Bali where he had gone to attend a medical seminar. You can call it nothing other than celestial cruelty that a person who was there always for everyone had no one next to him when he took his final journey. Such is fate — unquestioned, unmoved and unpredictable. Some may know Dr Harsh Kumar, a radio-oncologist formerly with the AIIMS, as the person who led the anti-reservation stir and battled the policies formulated by the then Health Minister Ramadoss. But many, many more would, more importantly, remember him for the help he extended one and all — waving of fee of dying patients, getting unknown and harassed families access to top doctors in AIIMS, doling out cash to the poor, starting projects to help the underprivileged, working 24X7 himself to save lives and always sporting a smile when you approached him, he was more of a modern messiah than a modern doctor. Even when

The national outrage and concern kicked up by the well-engineered massacre of 76 CRPF men by Maoists last week is already dying down even as Home Minister P C Chidambaram has taken full responsibility for the incident and offered to resign. Taking full responsibility is rare in Indian Government and in that context PC’s move is refreshing — but the full-blown Maoist menace that stares our battered nation needs much more than mere verbal refreshments and the way it has been growing over the last decade we are seemingly in a situation which will take generations to abate, if at all, it abates. The statistics that have flooded newspapers in the wake of the ghastly massacre in Chhattisgarh are enough to run a chill down the spine of even the most unbothered person. None less than a Home Ministry assessment says as many as 223 districts across 20 States in the country are Maoist-hit which is up from just 55 districts in 2003! Not just that, in this decade when the Government was dealing wit

The week’s stunner came when tennis ace Sania Mirza announced her upcoming marriage with Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Malik. Though it will be considered highly inflammable to officially conclude that Sania may have gone nuts in taking such a step, a bulk of the drawing-room chatterati definitely thinks so. There are two, actually three, ways of looking at this premise-less development. Like Sania’s father Imran Mirza, you could eulogise it as an aman ki asha move that would go a long way in bringing peace between the two bickering nations; like the usual cynic who may just not be bothered about anything at all on Earth, you could dismiss it as non-newsy, private decision among two families with no national or international connotations whatsoever; or you could criticise it as something that an Indian icon need not have done. The third view, howsoever politically incorrect, comes up with the best arguments, which do not just hinge on the usual anti-Pakistan tirade equated to jingoism. Co