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Bill Clinton writes in his new book 'The Missing President': “When you find a mountain to expose in one person or party, you have to pick a molehill on the other side and make it into a mountain to avoid being accused of bias. The built-up molehills also have large benefits: increased coverage on the evening news, millions of retweets, and more talk-show fodder. When the mountains and molehills all look the same, campaigns and governments devote too little time and energy debating the issues that matter most to our people. Even when we do that, we’re often drowned out by the passion of the day.”

‘Personal interest’ shouldn’t overshadow ‘national interest’. One journalist knows this better than most. He once let his scooped out journalist mind report a coup that wasn’t a coup. Divested of the thought rather ingloriously, he ventured out only to ‘Walk the Talk’ with politicians and celebrities, quizzing them about their personal interests. One such was Kashmiri Congress leader Saifuddin Soz whose personal interest in Pakistan holding on to POK goes against India’s ‘national interest’!

July the 7th will always be remembered as a historical day. On this day in 2017 the world community decided to vote for complete nuclear disarmament and save the world from catastrophe that could threaten the very existence of mankind. It wasn’t an easy task. The UN General Assembly passed a Treaty Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) with 122 countries voting in favour of the resolution. Only one country, the Netherlands voted against while Singapore abstained. It is an irony that none of the nuclear armed countries, the USA, Russia, China, England, France, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea participated in the deliberations. All the countries who voted for the resolution withstood pressures of all kinds, threats, blackmail, economic allurements, nuclear security umbrella etc. from the powerful nuclear weapon possessing countries and voted with one voice to declare all activities related to nuclear weapons, including their possession, manufacture, putting them on alert, trade, sale etc, as illegal.

‘Postcard News’ stands branded as fake news ever since its editor tweeted a clearly false news. Sunday morning US President Donald Trump added Washington Post to the list, opining (not a reporter’s word) that if WaPo employees go on a long strike “we would get rid of Fake News for an extended period of time.”

The Bristol Old Vic Production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, currently being staged at Los Angeles, is a masterful rendition of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece about the human condition. The British cast is led by the venerable Jeremy Irons, who won an Oscar for 1990’s Reversal of Fortune, and Lesley Manville, who was Academy Award-nominated this year for portraying Daniel Day-Lewis’ sadistic sister in Phantom Thread.

Twenty-five years ago, as grapevine had it, when the then general secretary of Communist Party of India Indrajit Gupta was reportedly approached to write a forward for the first comprehensive English version of Karl Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts from the Russian text, the CPI leader declined confessing that he couldn’t write anything about a work which he wasn’t aware of, let alone having read it. However, the translator, Pradip Baksi, a Kolkata-based- Marx scholar and a rare strain of polymath, is not aware of this. But the maverick CPI(M) leader Subhas Chakraborty ensured that the then CPI(M) general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet would write the forward Baksi confirms. CPI and CPI(M) leaders were expected to be abreast of the fact the Moscow-publisher ‘Nauka’ had published it in 1968 in Russian. And it’s not that no Indian communist leader or ‘ideologue’ , including Gupta and Surjeet , had read the voluminous text which was already discussed among historians of mathematics abroad. Marx prepared the manuscript at the fag end of his life.

Lynching is mob action. A ‘group of people’ lynch. So the term ‘mob lynching’ is an oxymoron. Lynching is mostly out in the open. In town and village square. In the Wild West of America it was stringing from the nearest tree. A couple or more people cook up a lie over a rumour spread like wildfire. And the falsely accused is killed by the group without trial. The choice of weapons is left to the moron: Scythe, machete, club and spear. The long rope!

Arundhati Roy’s first book God of Small Things won the Man Booker in 1997. Second book Ministry of Utmost Happiness made it to the list but sank in its own sea of utmost unhappiness. Not surprising. For, it is like “beyond the flyover, the city got less sure of itself.”

George Fernandese, roaring lion of Indian politics till the first half decade of this century was immobilized in bed inside his home in New Delhi. The fully air conditioned room had a look of a hospital room with his wife Leila Kabir attending and nursing him. However, he was not even aware. His deeply sunk eyes were open and looking at the ceiling but without seeing anything. Retina images were not transported to the brain that was left with no memories. Without memories, there is not mind.

The “condottiere” of India’s Opposition parties are being hailed post latest bypolls. These leaders of a brand of mercenaries are under a “cendre’ right now and their supporters seem to be cured of “ankyloglossia”. Hey! What’s all that? The answer to that is these three words in quote-unquote won Texan-American Karthik Nemmani the 2018 Scripps National Spelling Bee title the other night, and they also explain goings on in India!