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Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time and Citizen Pranab Mukherjee’s A Short History of Bharato! One a book, the other an oral summation. Hawking’s book was for eighth graders and it explained complex concepts such as space, time and black holes to the simple mind. Pranab’s quick summary of the entropy of India through 2000+ years of war and peace was to “RSS officers” with “exceptional brains”.

Against the popular belief among Indians that India is one of the most peaceful nations of the world, it has been declared 28th worst peaceful nation ranking 136th out of 163 nations measured for peacefulness by the Global Peace Index 2018. In comparison to last year, India scored only a little better by 0.025 pushing its rank up by four from 140th rank. The country’s overall score is 2.504 on a scale of 0-10.

LUCKNOW: Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath appears to be in deep trouble after the humiliating defeat in Kairana and Noorpur by-elections.

BHOPAL: Eight days of farmers’ agitation have passed off peacefully. The only major event during this period was the visit of Congress president Rahul Gandhi to Mandsaur district, which saw six persons killed in violence last year. Five of them were killed by police bullets. Congress arranged the visit of Rahul Gandhi to coincide with the first anniversary of this brutal act of the police. Besides addressing a massive rally, Rahul also met the family members of those who were killed by the Police.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not a radical reformer. He is a great administrator and not a reformer as he seems, the Economist said. The report card of his four years governance envisages that he is more laudable in administration and bureaucracy than in economic reforms. Nonetheless, he ushered the country into high growth trajectory and bolstered it into the highest global growth trend, surpassing China.

The Indian economic growth figures for January- March 2018 quarter announced early June are certainly encouraging. The CSO figures say fourth quarter of 2017-18 recorded 7.7 per cent GDP growth, which is an eight quarter high. Following this growth momentum, the overall GDP is now revised upwards to 6.7 per cent for 2017-18. This indicates that the demonetization impact is fading and GST related glitches are getting resolved, rating agency Crisil says, adding the broad take away is that there has been a sharp upturn in economic activity. The corporate results too are healthy and looking up. There is no doubt that the economy is on a recovery mode but there are several problems in the economy, which are not getting reflected in the GDP figures. These irritants could derail the growth process if correctives were not found immediately.

The poll battlefield for Lok Sabha 2019 has become wide open in the aftermath of Kairana, the third script-changing by-poll loss for the ruling BJP in its heartland (UP). This was on top of other countrywide reverses the party suffered over recent weeks.

Reserve Bank raising the repo rate by a quarter of one percent has clearly come as a relief when ever since the publication of the national income statistics indicated fourth quarter growth rate to have sharply gone up to 7.7 per cent. Many economists and financial market analysts had started saying that a rate hike was unavoidable in the current circumstances.

Pastoral brings to mind rolling hills, green meadows, scattered farms, standing crops, farms, sheep, fowl, horses, cow, smoke rising lazily from chimneys... and in the distance, the spires of a church. Peaceful. Idyllic. Pastoral.

Hundreds of thousands of people are “trapped” in debt and facing legal trouble because they cannot afford to pay for social care, research by the GMB union has found. The report, which is based on freedom of information requests submitted to local authorities by the union, reveals that at least 166,835 people are in arrears on their social care payments.