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India is increasingly losing happiness by the year. World Happiness Report 2018 of the United Nations reveals that Indians are increasingly becoming unhappy. It scored only 4.190 on a scale of 0-10 in 2017, which is only a little more than the passing mark of 3.3 if life would have been an exam. It fell in global happiness ranking by 11 places in comparison to its fall in 2016 by four places. Only 23 countries out of 156 surveyed are unhappier than India, which ranked 133rd in the world. It means 84.61 per cent countries are happier than we are. We have lost our level of happiness during 2015-17 compared to 2008-10 by 0.698 points, making us the top 15th loser of the world ranking 128th out of 141. The fall was primarily due to declines in average life evaluations suffered due to a combination of economic, political, and social stresses. Increased rates of crime, conflict, suicide, and depression can be cited as its effect.

Tamil Nadu’s is getting a bit crowded for political parties with one added every month. The last one was Kamal Haasan’s Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM). Thursday morning, TTV Dinakaran launched his party, Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam, with ‘Amma’ making its debut in a party name. Not even ‘Amma’ J Jayalalithaa’s All India Anna DMK (AIADMK) has that honour.

LUCKNOW: Besides the understanding between Samajwadi Party and BSP, the anger of BJP workers and leaders and the collapse of administration are responsible for the humiliating defeat of BJP in Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha by-elections.

To say that politics is fragile is to bend with the wind. If anything, politics takes oxygen through democracy’s fault-lines. A particular party is rejected by the voter and politics peaks – EVM fraud! The machines are working for the ruling party and we don’t have the time-technology to dispatch The Terminator back in time to assassinate the EVM, so let’s character-assassinate the Election Commission.

In politics, situation changes very fast and one month is not a long period. For the ruling party BJP, only 11 days have passed since their victory in Tripura and successes in other two states on March 3 leading to the euphoria that the saffrons are invincible. And now after the declaration of the by election results in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the same BJP led by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Amit Shah lie shattered, the saffron fort of Gorakhpur is lost. The combination of Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party has done the miracle.

Union Government in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has set in motion merger of the existing process of physical police verification for issue of passports with the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS), set up by the previous UPA Government in 2009, to eliminate physical police verification.

A message is making viral rounds on social media by young enthusiastic but narrow minds eager to demoralize the opponents of the ruling regime. They may have been induced to be overactive in distorting realities by their sense of anticipation of elections to the Lok Sabha earlier than the scheduled time of April May 2019. They got the encounter the Congress president Rahul Gandhi had with the undergraduate students of the Singapore University. But the message is not in response to a question by any student but from an Indian teaching economics to graduates in Singapore. Rahul Gandhi could not answer. It was enough for enthusiastic to go viral as it accorded them an opportunity to present the young leader in bad light.

Pleasing few people but himself, GOP President Donald Trump dumped Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in an early-morning tweet on March 13, replacing him with CIA Director Michael Pompeo, a former Kansas right-wing congressman, foe of the Iran nuclear deal and past advocate of torture of alleged “terrorists.”

For the Congress, the dinner was ‘last’ night, the realization was ‘this’ morning. That was because in the line-up of the UPA, assuming that it will be an alliance of the UPA including the BSP and the SP in 2019, where does Rahul Gandhi and his Congress Party stand in the leadership stakes? Who will lead the alliance come 2019 with such egos as Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee prone to play second to none? Especially, after the Congress has nothing to show for the Sonia dinner.

The signing of the controversial tariff hike on steel and aluminum by the U.S .President Donald Trump on March 8 in the White House in the presence of workers from the afflicted industries has generated not only a lively debate within the country but also globally. For a person who had successfully enacted a host of popular reality shows in television in the past, the optics and the theatrics that accompany his polemical decision as the first citizen of the world’s largest democracy count in terms of its wider ramifications. This is obviously to get a political message through and to reassure his voters that he is there to safeguard their livelihood interests.