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Have India’s traditional political parties – national and regional – lost faith in their ranks to catch the imagination of ordinary voters or the common man? It would appear so in this election season when the parties are vying with each other to trap as many celebrities as possible to contest the 2014 Lok Sabha polls on their behalf instead of their committed, round-the-year campaigning hard-nosed professional party folks. Big-time public entertainers – past and present - are in great demand from political parties across the country to stand in for the coming Lok Sabha election on their tickets to win seats.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: With the candidates’ lists having been finalized, both the ruling United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Opposition Left Democratic Front (LDF) have hit the campaign trail for a bruising, no-holds-barred battle for the 20 Lok Sabha seats from the State.

No wonder that President of BJP Mr Rajnath Singh rushed to Chennai to clinch a deal solely designed to ensure that this national party, which has no effective presence in Tamil Nadu, could ride on the backs of smaller Dravidian outfits in its bid to capture power at the Centre.

As India gets deeper into a historic election battle, harsh external winds, mostly geopolitical, have begun to flow, compounding the economic and political challenges for a new government to assume office within two months. It remains to be seen how the new tensions in Europe over Ukraine, reviving cold war memories, play out in the coming weeks.

The big picture emerging slowly with the political parties declaring their candidates for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections is interesting. The alliances are more or less sealed. The campaign too is picking up fast with the big wigs crisscrossing the country. More than 814 million people — a number larger than the population of Europe — will vote in the world’s biggest democratic exercise from 7 April to 12 May.

LUCKNOW: BJP faces a tough task in quelling the revolt-like situation in several districts of Uttar Pradesh after release of first list of candidates.

People who live in glass houses must not throw stones. It is rather odd that imperialist west which annexed half the world’s sovereign territories in earlier centuries should gang up to try to stall Crimea’s legal right to determine what is good for itself and its people - to stay with Ukraine or rejoin Russia of which it was a part until recently. As usual, leading the cowboys of the west is the United States, which annexed one after another independent territories, including Texas, Hawaiian Islands and Alaska.

Twenty-five-year-old Fizza Malik began her career as a legal practitioner on 1 March at the Islamabad district court, after graduating from the Islamabad School of Law last year under a distance learning programme with the UK's University of North Umbria. But on 3 March, the charming youth had her mundane innings tragically terminated following a twin suicide attack in the first hours of court business. It was natural that Pakistan’s media and social networks were up on their feet in a rare feat of sobriety outpouring grief, which was prominently telecast by BBC Urdu service correspondent Iram Abbasi.

Senior Congress leader Digvijay Singh once described himself as a loose cannon. That was the time when he called P Chidambaram ‘intellectually arrogant’ in connection with the launching of the so-called Operation Green Hunt against the Maoists. Chidambaram, who was then the union home minister, earned the praise of the BJP for being so proactive compared to his predecessor, the ‘spectacularly inept’ - according to Wikileaks - Shivraj Patil.

New Delhi: India has decided to file an appeal against an Italian court's order for encashment of bank guarantees worth over Rs 2,360 crore (about 300 million euro) of AgustaWestland as part of penalties in chopper deal.