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Mumbai: Former India cricketer Sanjay Manjrekar feels that ''it is easier to wear a helmet and face fast bowling than playing kabaddi.”

After being sworn in as the new president of the Maldives, Mohamed Muizzu, 45, has formally asked India to withdraw its military personnel from the Indian Ocean archipelago. This request was made during a meeting between Muizzu and India’s Minister for Earth Sciences, Kiren Rijiju, who was present at Muizzu’s swearing-in ceremony on November 17. The Muizzu administration is currently also reviewing approximately 100 agreements, including defence and security pacts, signed with India during the tenure of the previous president, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih.

With a knack of hitting the headlines, be it by scoring a century or taking off his shirt and standing bare-chested at Lords cricket ground or becoming BCCI president, Sourav Ganguly is in the news again. This time as the brand ambassador of West Bengal, the state arguably India's left handed batsman lives in.

Who is ‘Panauti’ for which political party will be known on December 3 when votes are counted and the results of the assembly elections are out. And if the 2024 general election favours the INDI-Alliance, the Election Commission, which has issued a show cause notice to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for his anti-Prime Minister Narendra Modi remarks, will forget ‘Panauti’ and ‘pickpocket’, both.

As in neighbouring West Bengal, efforts to ensure a one-on-one contest by the INDIA constituents against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls are not going well in Assam , the biggest state in the Northeast with 14 seats.

One of the striking findings of the Bihar Caste Survey, which bears out what the Left has been asserting for a long time, is that absolute poverty in the country is far more pervasive than what successive governments in India have been claiming. It shows that 34.1per cent of Bihar’s population has a monthly household income of Rs 6,000 or less. This benchmark figure of Rs 6000 per month corresponds to what the official “poverty line” itself should be on the government’s own criterion, though these days the government has stopped talking about the poverty line altogether; it has adopted instead the concept of “multi-dimensional poverty” propagated by some international organisations which shows only 15 per cent of the country’s population in poverty! Bihar, it is true, does not represent the country as a whole, but the Bihar Survey figure is so large that the pervasiveness of poverty in the country cannot be denied.

Trying to arouse the sub regional feeling, exploit the sensibilities of the local people towards Sachin Pilot and more than this to feast on the factional differences at the top in Rajasthan Congress, Vishwaguru Narendra Modi came up with the most nonsensical lie. A master of manipulation and half-truths, Modi claimed that the late Congress leader Rajesh Pilot had supported rebel Jitendra Prasad, when the latter contested elections against Sonia Gandhi for the Congress presidency in November 2000. Rajesh Pilot had dared to challenge the authority of the Gandhi family.

The greed of the capital along with its market-controlled path of development is making the lives of people more and more miserable. The people are being denied even their basic rights of safe air, water, and landmass. The capitalistic rulers everywhere are doing only lip service to the safety of the people. Their policies one after another are breaking all the fundamental structures of a decent life guaranteed by Article 21 of the Constitution. The more they preach, the less they act as it can be seen from the Modi government policies evidently moving in this direction.

Headlines like ‘People ready to defeat BRS’ do not reveal the whole truth. There is a media narrative against Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao and the man is media-meat. If the media pronouncements are taken at face value, the BRS has been scalped and laid out to dry. Everybody of note, from inside and outside Telangana, is predicting KCR is soon-to-be erstwhile Chief Minister because BRS is not in the pink of health.

India may not have crossed the US$4 trillion economy mark as some of the Narendra Modi fans tried to propagate in the recent days in social media but certainly the total GDP is approaching that level. However some economists fear that GDP growth in the last few quarters may be overestimated. With wholesale price index being in negative territory during the last 2 or 3 quarters, growth is bound to be overestimated as WPI is used as a deflator in the calculation of growth numbers. So the GDP growth at 7.8 per cent in the first quarter this financial year 2023-24 is believed to be grossly exaggerated, so also the GDP numbers of the previous quarters. So according to one estimate the actual growth during the period under review could at best be around 6.5 per cent.