Effective midnight tonight, the economic and commercial landscapes of India will undergo a paradigm shift. The biggest indirect tax reform since independence, the Goods, and Services Tax (GST) is going to come into force. 17 indirect taxes, 33 different kinds of levies and cess, the never-ending harassment of business owners by the tax authorities not to mention the constant rent seeking by the police at state border check posts, all this will hopefully become history as the whole country will become a common market with a flat rate of tax across the board. This is a huge leap of faith in the dark because nothing like this has ever been done before in this country. This GST is by no means ideal or perfect and it will remain a work in progress, tweaked here and there as we go along. For the moment though the Modi government deserves to be congratulated.

The word that came to my mind after reading Arundhati Roy's second novel after 20 years, 'The Ministery Of Utmost Happiness' was, ''underwhelming''.  Don't get me wrong, this is not an inferior book by any stretch of the imagination.  In fact, quite the opposite.  I just feel she took too much on the plate as subject matter.  After the luminous success of 'The God Of Small Things' two decades ago, she not only became a different kind of writer, but also a different kind of person.  In the intervening years, Ms. Roy went headlong into activism and advocacy negotiating the dangerous fault lines of the modern Indian state.  From Gujarat pogrom of 2002 to the insurgency in Kashmir, from resistance against big dams to the atrocities on the tribal population in India's own heart of darkness, the forests of Chhatisgarh.  She has been a stellar and provocative voice on all of these and more.
  What has been most remarkable about this new book is that how she has been able to bring together so many disparate elements from a nation's life together and weave a cohesive, even if at times unwieldy narrative.  It is a tribute to her exceptional skill as a writer, that even though the incidents that form the backdrop of the novel are very much contemporary in nature, you just want to keep going.  Especially in the section on Kashmir, the prose literally soars to new heights.  Why I said ''underwhelming'' in the beginning is because for some reason, it doesn't quite capture the haunting beauty of 'The God Of Small Things', and as a great admirer of Arundhati, it kept bothering me somewhat.

What do you say when a genuine intellectual like Gopal Gandhi is brushed aside for somebody like Mr. Ram Nath Kovind, who is the opposite of intellectual, for the august office of the President of India.  This is a piece of pathetic tokenism by the BJP in the name of Dalit empowerment.  Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, both have politics on their mind 24/7.  So much so that now it really feels suffocating.  Every nomination and appointment made by this government has the sole focus of either this election or that election, or if not elections, then a cynical desire to have lackeys (chamchas) in important positions.  How are they any different from the Congress party whom they want to obliterate from the country?  At the very least, with the Congress, you could shame them into doing the right thing from time to time.  The BJP of Shah-Modi combine is devoid of any shame.

A dreadful moment for the Conservative party in Britain. Prime Minister Theresa May badly miscalculated the extent of support she enjoyed among the British public. The Tories had a good thing going with a comfortable majority in parliament. But Ms. May wanted an even bigger mandate before she enters into tough Brexit negotiations with the European Union. What does she do? She calls for snap elections, and instead of shoring up her majority even further, the opposite has happened. The voters have returned a hung parliament. The Conservatives will have to form a minority government and the prime minister will have to depend on the support of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, one of the most extreme entities on the British Isle. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place.

My first loyalty is not to India, but to the state of Bihar. And I take no pleasure in saying that the shocking results of the intermediate examinations are symptomatic of the deeper rot that has set into the education system of the state as a whole. Every year, we're just producing an army of semi-educated young men and women who are both unemployed and unemployable. Once upon a time, we used to have a very hardworking chief minister in Mr. Nitish Kumar with a progressive development-oriented agenda. He is squandering away all the goodwill by firstly, this puritanical zeal in imposing prohibition at the cost of every other important matter in the state, and secondly, the decision to enter into an alliance with a thoroughly discredited Lalu Yadav, who does not so have a political party as a gang of mercenary thugs. Bihar is crying out for deliverance from this miasma of anarchy, cynicism, and boredom.