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There is this continuing spectacle. You ask for an interest rate cut from the in every season: when prices show a little drop; when the stock market goes up; and, when the government thinks growth is not as much as they would like it to be.

Cryptocurrencies are creeping into Indian households through newspaper inserts, just like the ubiquitous coaching centres, full-body check-ups, home-delivery foods and so on. It is perhaps for the first time that the cryptos are coming round to the ground like this. What it means is that the time for cryptocurrencies, made famous by its most valuable brand ambassador bitcoin, has finally arrived on the Indian scene and is ready to enter the mainstream.

Nitish Kumar may appear to be in an enviable position, having a firm control on the political developments in Bihar, but in reality he is pursuing a one-step-forward-two-steps-backward policy. His nonconformist stand in the wake of corruption charges against Lalu Yadav and his deputy chief minister son Tejashvi and daughter Misha Bharati has created a sense of bewilderment amongst his partymen and also kept the bureaucracy on tenterhooks.

Our country is in the midst of a profound governmental crisis. This crisis is revealing itself deep within the bourgeois state, that hallowed body of legislators, lawyers, and corporate lobbyists vaunted by some as the apogee of modern civilization. There are overlapping crises in the White House, in the executive as a whole, and between the presidency and the federal judiciary. Fault lines also lie in the relationship between the presidency and Congress with regard to traditional checks and balances and consent for judicial nominees. Congress itself is not immune, as witnessed by the subversion of the traditional filibuster rule. Here, GOP partisanship is pursued to the exclusion of all else. In the period before the election, the vacillation and caving of neoliberal Democrats was also to blame.

KOLKATA: For once, one can agree with Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) leader Benoy Tamang: as the indefinite bandh in North Bengal hills seems destined to enter a second month, he asked publicly, “Is Darjeeling out of India?”

BHOPAL: Leaders of all the factions of Madhya Pradesh Congress met at Lahar, a small town in Bhind district, an area regarded as the Scindia stronghold while the assembly constituency there is represented by Dr. Govind Singh, a staunch follower of Digvijay Singh. By hosting the meeting there, Dr. Govind Singh conveyed the message that his faction's rivalry with Scindia is now a closed chapter.

Corruption in India has been on the rise notwithstanding the rhetorical hypes of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the contrary. All efforts by the NDA Government including demonetisation, income tax, CBI and Enforcement Directorate raids against corporate houses, arms dealers and political adversaries during the last over three years has come a cropper. All measures, overt and covert, taken so far to unearth black money and cleanse Indian economy of parallel economy has failed.

NEW DELHI: The Communist Party of India in a statement today severely condemned the attack and killings of seven pilgrims of Amarnath Yatra and demanded a proper inquiry into this gruesome incident.

Under Mr Donald Trump, America seems to have begun a process of disengagement, though selectively yet, at the risk of forfeiting its global leadership and its prized “exceptionalism”. This has now become formal with US withdrawal from Paris Agreement on climate change, announced at the G-20 Hamburg Summit, while Mr Trump remains equally determined to scuttle moves on free trade, away from protectionism.

It was only a question of time. After the renaming of Aurangzeb Road in Lutyens Delhi – although an Aurangzeb Lane has avoided detection from the Hindutva votaries – Mughalsarai was living on borrowed time. The railway station and town in Uttar Pradesh is doubly damned. First, it recalls the name of a group of invaders and, secondly, it uses one of their alien words – sarai - to denote a bhojanalaya or an eatery. There is no way, therefore, for it to survive in its present form at a time when the Bharat Mata ki Jai brigade is in power both at the Centre and in Lucknow.