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THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Will the Pala assembly constituency spring an ugly surprise on the Congress-led United Democratic Front? Or, will the CPI(M)-headed Left Democratic Front (LDF)create history by wresting the seat after 54 years?

India is passing through the time of newness: whether it is new culture, new economy, new education, new labour or New India everything is being projected as the archetypal of novelty.

Analysts are noticing a new kind of dynamism in the oil market, which seems to have set off a mechanism of internal management of the demand-supply situation, anchoring it on the overall state of the global economy. This is a welcome development for countries like India, which faced the risk of price spiral in the wake of the recent attack on the Saudi oil refinery and its dangerous implications for the economy.

The coming elections in Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand, expected to be held next month (October), are considered politically significant because they will reveal the popular rating of the BJP; how much it fell after Lok Sabha election or went up. The elections to Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh assemblies showed that the BJP rating had fallen sharply after the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

In a history-making decision, the Government of India has prohibited electronic cigarettes by the promulgation of the Prohibition of Electronic Cigarettes (Production, Manufacture, Import, Export, Transport, Sale, Distribution, Storage and Advertisement) Ordinance, 2019 on September 18.The effect of the ordinance is to ban production, manufacture, import, export, transport, sale, distribution, storage and advertisement of electronic cigarettes.

Bhagat Singh was born on September 27, 1907. At a very young age he involved himself in the freedom struggle. He was only 23, when he was hanged on March 23, 1931. But even by that time, he had spoken and written so much about his ideology and his vision for a free India; he had influenced the whole country to the extent that has no parallel and he had played such a role in the freedom struggle that he was acknowledged as one of the greatest national heroes, and came to be known as Shaheed-e-Azam, the great martyr.

Smoking tobacco is the single largest cause of preventable death around the world. With more than 7 million premature deaths due to smoking including second-hand smoke yearly, the menace of smoking is far away from being tamed and is estimated to reach a massive 8 million by 2030.

A few days before BJP government did away with the special status of Jammu and Kashmir and stripped it of statehood, I spoke to 15odd people comprising journalists, academics and intellectuals from both within and outside the state, now Union Territory, about the central government’s plans vis-a-vis Jammu and Kashmir after it deployed legions of additional forces in the valley. From the odds of scrapping article 370 to cross LOC infiltration, almost every issue was taken up. There were some good conjectures with little logic while many directly precluded the possibility of abrogation of special status of the state, assigning reason and logic. The valley was in bedlam and people were desperate to know about what the government was up to. The rumours flew thick and fast for quite few days. A day before August 6 when the balloon went up, a New Delhi based journalist friend messaged me about the government’s designs to hollow the state out of its special status.

The Left parties — CPI, CPI(M) CPI(ML), Forward Bloc and RSP — are holding a joint convention on September 20, 2019 in the national capital to chart out a protest action programme against the deepening slowdown and huge loss of jobs in almost all the sectors. The half-hearted measures that the government is taking will only worsen the situation and add to the miseries of the people on the eve of the festivals’ month that is fast approaching. The retail inflation has already started inching up and touched a 10-month high of 3.21 per cent in August, according to government’s own data released on September 12.

As India is struggling to respond to economic, environmental, and social transformations, we feel lack of intellectual capital both in quality and quantity. Knowledge is the core of this capital, but that our Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a deep-rooted contempt towards higher education is an open secret, which he had revealed long back in 2014 after first holding the reins of this country. While addressing school students in a live telecast, he had given more emphasis on [low-order] skill by running down higher educational attainment and high-order skill. He did not stop there, and soon after created the Ministry of Skill Development, which mostly catered to low-order skill, and in this process the demand for higher-order skills and competencies were almost ignored, which were required in the economic and social arena, resulting in a mess in both.