Sandeep Sahu

There are many reasons why Naveen Patnaik remains head and shoulders over all other politicians in Odisha, faces little threat of anti-incumbency as he braces for his fifth successive term as Chief Minister and has...

The year was 1986. One fine evening, Muna Patnaik, my good friend who shared a room with me at the time, came rushing into the room in a highly excited state. When I asked him...

The cat is out of the bag. The worst kept secret of the august house called Vidhan Sabha came tumbling out of the hallowed precincts of the Odisha Assembly on Tuesday evening when two leading...

Can a bureaucrat – or anyone anyone holding a public office for that matter – eject a reporter from a briefing for the media on the grounds of ‘biased’ coverage? Or pick and choose which...

One of the major factors behind the landslide victory for Naveen Patnaik and his party in the 2014 elections was the overwhelming support of women. Naveen himself acknowledged as much in his first reaction after...

The media loves nothing more than speculation. Anticipating and second guessing the supposed moves of political parties and leaders is what it revels in. In doing so, it is never deterred by the absence of...

The stars of the business world, who descended on Bhubaneswar for the second edition of the Make in Odisha conclave, must have been quite impressed with what they saw in the Smart City: freshly coated...

For a whole generation of Odias growing up in the seventies and eighties, Chitta Jena’s was the voice of the ultimate romantic. While other stalwarts of the era like Akshay Mohanty, Sikandar Alam and Pranab...

It is easy to see that the Opposition description of the second edition of ‘Make in Odisha’ jamboree, which got underway in Bhubaneswar on Sunday evening, as nothing more than ‘event management’ and an image...

A few days ago, I was puzzled to see the city I have always known as Ahmedabad spelt as Amdavad somewhere. “It must have been a printing mistake,” I told myself. When I saw the...

The flurry of gift-dispensing activity seen across Odisha on the occasion of Diwali revives the age old question: when does a ‘gift’ stop being a gift and become ‘illegal gratification’? This question, in turn, spawns...

Utterances by politicians – and economists – on the second ‘death anniversary’ of the Rs. 1000 note have been on predictable lines. Depending on which side of the political divide they are, these wise heads...

The virtual confirmation on Sunday that the tiger killed by poachers in the Debrigarh forests in Bargarh district was a Royal Bengal Tiger (RBT) – and not a leopard, as the Forest minister and the...

As the sordid details of the murky goings-on inside the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) keep tumbling out one after another, they help answer many of the questions that have been bothering those who have...

A drunken man gets into a street brawl after dashing his car against a bike and gets soundly thrashed for it. A police patrol party arrives, rescues him from the clutches of the angry mob,...

One can only pity Puri SP Dr. Sarthak Sarangi. The poor man is taking all the flak for a decision which he, left to himself, would perhaps never have taken. He would have known that...

“I was asked to write about the Oriyas (Odias). What is there to write about these poor chaps? Ever since they got a thrashing at the hands of Ashoka in the battle of Kalinga, they...

History is witness to the fact that meaningful social change has never come easy anywhere in the world. And when it is a conservative society bound by centuries of tradition like India, change becomes even...

With a large number of people living within or close to forests, the phenomenon of humans being killed by wild animals is not exactly uncommon in India. Human greed and rapacity has seen the country’s...

When something happens twice, it is coincidence. But when it happens, without fail, every single time on a dozen or so different occasions, there has to be something more than coincidence to explain it away....