Sandeep Sahu

The setting aside of the election of Jogesh Kumar Singh of the Congress as the Sundargarh MLA by the Orissa High Court on Tuesday has brought into sharp focus an issue that has not been...

Political prediction is always fraught with risks. Even seasoned commentators have ended up with egg on their faces after crystal gazing into the future. But ‘Scandeep’ will still stick its neck out and predict that...

Attending a day-long function in Sambalpur last Tuesday was a revelation for this columnist. The occasion was the felicitation of 50 ‘Change Agents’ unearthed by volunteers of ‘Yes We Can’, a unique organization that aims...

When your intentions are not above board, you invariably end up tying yourself in knots. And that is what the BJD and the state government have done in two separate cases: the suicide by the...

It is not easy being a journalist in these polarized times, more so if you write opinion pieces. You write something that goes even remotely against a party, a leader or a school of thought...

The victim of the Kunduli ‘gang rape that wasn’t’ could not have chosen a worse time to commit suicide. Conspiracy theorists in government and ruling party circles may even be looking for an ‘opposition design’...

No award, not even the Nobel Prize, is free of controversies these days. So, there was no surprise when the conferment of the ‘Ideal Chief Minister’ award on Naveen Patnaik at MIT World Peace University,...

Millions of jatra fans must have been shattered after watching on TV or hearing the news about the decision of owners to shut down their jatra parties from this year today. The decision does not...

A couple of weeks ago, my wife had an attack of cold while on a trip to Baripada. What followed was a particularly severe and seemingly endless bout of dry cough. As usual, I rushed...

On the face of it, the rebellion of sorts by the four honourable judges of the Supreme Court concerns procedural issues in the way the Supreme Court has been functioning of late. But one just...

Everyone talks about him. But for some strange reason, no one names him. Rarely has an officer – and that too one not belonging to the senior echelons of the bureaucracy – enjoyed so much...

On Saturday, Shreyas Keshwani joined the long list of victims of campus ragging in India. It was painful watching him in the video doing the rounds narrating his nightmarish ordeal and naming his tormentors between...

There are two ways in which Laloo Prasad Yadav is viewed outside Bihar depending on the social (read caste) origins, educational accomplishments and political leanings of the person concerned. People belonging to the ‘lower’ or...

These days, the term ‘paid media’ is used in abandon – and more often than not by people who know nothing about the working or economics of the media business. Fake, motivated reports, pictures and...

Yesterday, the Mahila Police Station in Bhubaneswar registered a case of rape against Saubhagya Swain, the inspector-in-charge (IIC) of the General Railway Police (GRP) station in the capital city, based on an FIR lodged by...

Arvind Kejriwal has come a long way since he burst into public consciousness with his pioneering work on the Right to Information (RTI), which won him the coveted Raman Magsaysay award, and then ignited the...

It has been a virtual deluge. Over the last 48-72 hours, ‘Happy New Year’ messages have been moving back and forth at lightning speed, peaking in the two hours on either side of what is...

The triple talaq bill passed by the Lok Sabha has evoked extreme reactions on either side of the political, social and gender divide. On the one side are the BJP and its supporters, women’s organizations...

My heart goes out to the ‘poor’ mine owners. Pointing a gun to their heads, they are being asked to pay fines worth thousands of crores and that too before the year is out. Even...

The Opposition attack on Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik for his lack of knowledge of Odia is getting a little too repetitive for comfort. In the 20 years since the formation of the BJD, the supremo...