Opinion News Updates

To understand the present-day situation of the Puri Jagannath temple administration, one needs to understand how it was originally designed. The recorded history of Srimandir is a long and interesting one.

Till the time this piece was being written, there was no official word from the CBI that BJD MLAs Arun Sahu and Atanu Sabyasachi Nayak have indeed been served notices in connection with the chit fund scam. Though it was ‘breaking news’ on all local TV channels on Tuesday evening, the source for all of […]

Already blurred for quite a while now, the lines between the government and the ruling party are vanishing fast as election day nears. In the latest example of how government funds are being brazenly used to keep BJD cadres in good humour, the government is in the process of drawing up a list of at […]

“Over 1000 trees felled PM Modi’s helipad in Odisha.” “Hundreds of trees felled to make space for PM’s helipad.” “Irreparable loss: 1000 trees cut in Odisha to build a helipad for PM Modi’s arrival.” The screaming headlines suggested that an ecological disaster of sorts had just taken place in Bolangir. The source for all these […]

The Narendra Modi government may like to believe that the resignation of Alok Verma brings ‘closure’ to the unsavoury saga in the CBI stretching over several months. But is it really a closure? I am afraid the answer to this question has to be a resounding ‘No’. Already fraying at the edges, the bitter and […]

There is no doubt that the ‘equi-distance’ jumla has served the interests of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) very well over the last few years. On the one hand, it has helped the ruling party to keep fooling the people of Odisha with the pretence of neutrality. On the other, it has also kept the […]

Let us not allow ourselves to be distracted by the needless – and ill-timed – debate over whether this was ‘bigger than 1983’ or whether Virat is ‘greater’ than Sachin. Those debates can wait for another day. Right now, it’s time to rejoice, celebrate and revel in the sweet smell of victory. After all, it […]

Poor Pradeep Maharathy! In a travesty of the criminal jurisprudence system, the ‘former’ Agriculture minister of Odisha has just earned the dubious distinction as the only member of the Odisha cabinet to be punished twice for the same ‘crime’. Having to resign twice – once on January 19, 2012 and then again on Sunday – […]

It is competitive populism at its worst. After the newly elected Congress governments in the heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh announced waiver of farm loans, every political party is now jumping on to the waiver bandwagon. At the national level, the Modi government, which had resisted all pressures to write off agricultural […]

Let us put the state government aside for a moment and stop doing a post-mortem of what it did or didn’t do, whether it did right or wrong, what it could have and couldn’t have done and so on. Here is a poser for every English reading Odia who happens to read this piece. Should […]

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 no challenger in sight in the horizon. The most important of these reasons, however, is his ability to constantly reinvent […]

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 reason for his excitement, he handed me a bunch of papers instead of answering my question. As I curiously […]

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 channels – OTV and News 7 – ran a story on how Parliamentary Affairs minister Bikram Keshari Arukh and the […]

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 media outlet s/he would talk to? The answer, I am afraid, has to be an emphatic and unambiguous ‘No’! It […]

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 win. Though the exact extent of women’s support for the BJD in that election is not known, estimates put […]