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There is much enthusiasm in the country to see French troops march down Rajpath along with Indian contingent on the country’s 67th Republic Day when President Francois Hollande will be the chief guest on the occasion. This will be the first time that a contingent from a foreign country would be participating in the march past on the day the country adopted the Constitution in 1950.

A class of small traders rush from fair to fair, some connected with special pilgrims and others to special days in a year, often with trinkets for household utility wares to earn their living. Rahul Gandhi, the Congress vice president seems to have adopted the technique and keeps rushing from incident to incident, nature inflicted or manmade, with very little to give except empty words of sympathies to victims and mostly to lay the blame at door steps of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He is accompanied by a large posse of young in company, who depend largely on seeking use of their visiting card for politics than on real action. He has nothing to offer as his party is politically bankrupt and organizationally a boneless hulk. As a person with high ambitions to be a national politician, he does not display on his sleeves a national solution for anyone problem, cause of catastrophes.

Global markets turned volatile from the start of the New Year and world growth, which slowed down to 2.5 per cent (market-based exchange rate), in 2015 faces more challenges and uncertainty in 2016 which would make it a 'bumpy ride' for emerging and developing world. India market is already down to the pre-Modi levels.

It was December 30 2015 when I had started writing this piece. Then Pathankot incident involving an armed attack on an Indian Air Force base happened. I am not a brave man. I thought, should I write this, now, when tricolour steroids are the hottest media-item of the week? But it's also true that barely a week ago, on December 27 2015, two Indian Border Security Force (BSF) jawans allegedly gang-raped a child after a third Indian Army jawan forced her to drink alcohol on the Howrah-Amritsar Express inside their “specially reserved” Army compartment. In the same week, in brown people's social media, some American celebrity's sexual crimes evoked greater outrage. There was no whimper of protest in Delhi – the city where the BSF and the Indian Army are head-quartered. I guess the victim was just Bengal's daughter and not India's and she had the added misfortune of having Khaki-clad brave men allegedly committing the crime. Allegedly. It's a word that many drop when talking about other rapists but never about these guys, not now. What is it about the ideologies and holy cows that are fed to us that the we think that the ejaculate of the rapists have a tricolour hue and hence worthy of respect and a conspiracy of silence? Hence, it is precisely now that we must speak up. If not now, when?

Jharkhand has been in the grip of severe water crisis for more than ten years but the ruling elites and the political executives instead of finding out the real reason have been resorting to one common rhetoric: that the situation can be salvaged by resorting to the water conservation. May be on their own way they are politically correct but one thing is clearly manifest that these people utterly lack the vision and desire to overcome the crisis.

There are several commonalities between India and Japan to trigger growth by foreign investment in domestic markets. Notwithstanding Japan being the third biggest world economy, it yearns for foreign investment. India needs foreign investment to make India a manufacturing hub of the world. Japan needs foreign investment to overcome the hollow investment in domestic economy.

India is celebrating her 66th Republican Day with one more woman rising in power corridors with Mehbooba Mufti taking over as the chief minister of the troubled state, Kashmir after keeping the male bastions -nervous and on toes for two weeks. She dictated her terms to the coalition partner, Bharatiya Janata Party to succeed her father Mufti Mohammad Sayeed. Her confidence was on assumption that nobody except her could or would succeed her father as the chief minister. Her father was genteel who was eager for a consensus. However the daughter is different. She dictated her terms for keeping the coalition going.

The dropping wholesale price index (WPI) may be of little interest to the common man and India’s 100 million industrial and services sector workers, who are struggling like never before to meet their daily dire necessities in the face of continuously rising retail prices. Already high and still rising food prices are a major cause of worry. The consumer price index for industrial workers (CPI-IW), what really matters to ordinary people, is rarely released in public with similar fanfare. Apart from sky rocketing retail food prices, an equally increasing cost of medicine and medical treatment and higher outgo on education are constantly putting an extra pressure on the working class and the poor. Falling petrol and diesel prices, which have been mostly behind the downward WPI, have little impact on the common man’s pocket. Low petro-products prices have not even reduced the cost of travel by public transport though they have come as good news for the automobile industry, automobile operators, car owners, the government and the petroleum processors using mostly imported crude oil. Falling WPI is not helping improve the quality of life of workers, the low income group and the poor.

Like Narendra Modi misnaming the Mahatma as “Mohanlal”, Rahul Gandhi, too, revealed the gaps in his knowledge of pre-1947 Indian history when he told the students of a management college in Mumbai that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had ignored British protests against his walking into Parliament House in London in his dhoti.

There has been a major improvement in connectivity between the Northeastern (NE) States and the Indian mainland, with the successful trial run of a special train on the newly completed Agartala to Ambasa broad gauge (BG) rail link.