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The cold-blooded violence of the Taliban, the ability of Germans to build precision instruments, the courteousness (‘How are you doing?’) of a white bus driver in Boston, the ‘sense of justice’ of the British, the ‘spirit of entrepreneurship’ of immigrant Europeans in North America, the dapper look of a New York police officer, the sense of duty, discipline and punctuality that is apparently absent among lesser folks — this long list is only a small set of qualities that are attributed to the intrinsic nature of a group of people.

LUCKNOW: AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi, during his recent trip to Uttar Pradesh, gave a new gurumantra to Congress workers — to ‘forget the past and move on’ — in order to prepare for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi has travelled many miles from the days of 2002 Godhra riots and today he is being talked about as the Prime Ministerial candidate of BJP. While he continues to get bashing from the secularists, his supporters and the Sangh Parivar hold him as their poster boy of Hindutva. Modi polarises not only his voters but also the entire country. Those who admire him, love him, while those who don’t, get put off by his style of functioning and arrogance.

Last week when 77-year-old retired Kolkata school teacher Stefan Strauss living with his ailing wife in an old ancestral house in a posh locality went to the nearest police station to lodge a first information report (FIR) against a local promoter for trying to scare him and force him to part with his 1,000-square yard plot to build a multi-storey residential building, he was taken aback by the response of the duty officer. The concerned duty officer very clearly said he would take the FIR and try to protect his family and property provided that he paid Rs. 60,000 as a small contribution towards a police co-operative housing unit under construction.

Summing up the varied facets of India-China relationship, one can point to a requisite for positive and steady future development. The requisite is that India and China can – and should – be competitors, but they must not be adversaries. Competition and cooperation go hand in hand, but adversarial competition is a different commodity. While fruits of beneficial India-China interaction are vast – almost limitless – the results of adversarial competition between the two are frightening.

Irrespective of the outcome of a vote in Lok Sabha on the most controversial reform the Congress-led UPA-II has brazenly advanced, FDI with majority holding in multi-brand retail, in a growingly volatile political India, the countdown has begun for the national poll, which could come off even by the summer of 2013.

By secretly hanging Ajmal Kasab for the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, the government committed a gross Constitutional impropriety and almost wrecked the chances of the attacks’ masterminds being brought to justice with Kasab as an invaluable witness. Kasab’s execution in Operation X exposes the crassness of “the hangman’s justice” and should trigger a demand for the abolition of the death penalty.