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It took barely a few days to realise that the May 1 target for rolling out the vaccination of the 18-44 age group, by far the biggest segment of the Indian population, was a scam. May 1 came and went off as a non-event. By May 1 even the CoWIN app that was supposed to register for a jab was not even fully functional. But registration blues were soon sorted out and registration on the portal was available for the asking, although it did not mean that the registrants were any length of time closer to receiving the all-important prick. It soon turned out that getting a slot was the bigger problem at hand. It was probably when the authorities set out probing why the slots were not available on the portal, did it emerge that there were no vaccine doses available. Because, in the first place, the supplies were never tied up.

New Delhi: Defending champion Amit Panghal and former World champion Mary Kom will spearhead 20-member Indian challenge at the ASBC Asian Boxing Championships being jointly hosted by BFI and UAE Boxing Federation.

April was the cruellest month. But then again, was it? May seemed crueller for the junta.

The Allahabad High Court says Uttar Pradesh citizens afflicted with Covid-19 have been left to ‘Ram Bharose’, meaning to the whims and fancies of the Almighty, especially those in the small towns and villages of Yogi Adityanath’s slipping out-of-hand bastion. The high court wasn’t happy that a Covid-19 patient had gone missing from a medical facility and, then, when he was found, he was deader than a tinned mackerel with no name to boot!

The Kolkattans woke up on Monday morning and learnt that two ministers, Firhad Hakim and Subrata Mukherjee, a former minister, Madan Mitra and a former minister and former mayor of Kolkata, Sobhan Chattopadhyaya, had been arrested by the CBI in connection with the sting operation carried out by one Mathew Samuel around 2014, in which some Trinamool Congress leaders were allegedly seen taking bribe. Though law and order is a state subject, the CBI effected the arrests with the help of the CISF, keeping the state government and the state police in the dark. The CISF surrounded not only the ministers’ homes but encircled the entire area as if mounting an operation against dangerous outlaws.

There is no more obscurity about the intention. The war cries have become loud and shrill and reverberating in the battle field of Bengal. Undeniably the first assault has been launched by home minister Amit Shah.

Chilean communists were among the big winners in elections to the country’s constitutional convention, taking 28 seats as the left scored a major victory in Sunday’s election.

Ruskin Bond’s short poem Lost All My Money brings home the point in a new book, India’s Long Walk Home. The point being, we are all the ‘Nowhere People’ with nothing. It reminds us of Rekha Bhardwaj’s song, O Re Bidesiya in the Hotstar film 1232 Kms.

There is a three-way confrontation going on amidst the raging Covid pandemic. The first is between the executive and judiciary, the second between the Union government and state governments. The third is between the authorities and the public.

Mamata Banerjee’s victory in the West Bengal assembly elections has set the stage for a renewed attempt to form a grand alliance (mahagathbandhan) of opposition parties at the national level to take on the BJP.