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The greetings and the good wishes have piled up at the entrance alongside dire predictions. Among the second lot are those which are related to the coronavirus. The coronavirus morphed several times and its latest variant Omicron is mildly severe compared to the horrendous Delta and its predecessor ‘Wuhan’, both of which raged and killed like there was a powerful shortage of souls for the fires of hell!

In its desperation to prove secularism irrelevant and worthless the rightist forces. BJP and RSS, are creating a Frankenstein monster by making the police into an arrogant force that turns democratic institutions into a ramshackle.

Qatar has begun to cleanse its schoolbooks of supremacist, racist or derogatory references as well as celebrations of violent jihad and martyrdom, according to a recently released study. The revision of textbooks in the final year leading up to Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 World Cup is designed to keep the Gulf state in the beauty pageant for the beacon of moderate Islam. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia are Qatar’s major competitors.

New Delhi: Indian sports received a major boost on Sunday with Prime Minister Narendra Modi laying the foundation stone of Major Dhyan Chand Sports University in Meerut in Uttar Pradesh.

Anti-apartheid icon Archbishop Desmond Tutu passed away on December 26 at 90. "He was ready. He went to meet his God, ready and willing," said his 61-year-old daughter Naomi Nontombi in a tribute to her father.

The current crisis in Europe of spiralling gas prices, coupled with a cold snap, brings out that the transition of any part of the world to green energy is not going to be easy. It also brings out the complexity in such a transition, that energy is not simply choosing the right technology, but that it has economic and geopolitical dimensions as well.

Omicron has put a spoke in the plan by companies to switch back to normal office work. As the new variant threatens to unleash a ‘Covid tsunami’, as forecast by the World Health Organisation, several companies have already delayed the switch back and asked their staff to continue working from home. Following the decision by global giants such as Google, Apple, Ford and others to delay resumption of work from office, several Indian companies have also put their plans to resume normal working on hold. Vedanta, Panasonic, Cognizant, KPMG, BigBasket have all announced a wait and watch approach and the line is swelling.

Akhilesh Yadav did an Aurangzeb on his father Mulayam Singh Yadav and grabbed the strings of the Samajwadi Party, which the father couldn’t thwart out of maybe filial reasons. But Mulayam’s younger sibling Shivpal Yadav could not stomach the usurpation and uncle and nephew broke ties—Shivpal Yadav formed his own political outfit, the Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party.

Fancying on Prime Minister Modi’s ‘One nation-One poll’ idea, the Reserve Bank of India has launched the ‘One nation-One ombudsman’ programme. But unlike Modi’s poll plan, which could change the very nature and structure of democracy and governance in India, the reason for which it is vehemently opposed by opposition parties, RBI’s ombudsman might hardly make a difference to the remediation of complaints against banks and financial institutions. By all available indications, the one nation ombudsman will be as toothless as the paper tiger that its previous incarnation was.

As the year draws to an end, one can risk a little speculation about what we can expect from politics in India in 2022. As its national government crosses the mid-term point, BJP will fight the opposition in seven state elections.