7th February

Identity Parade

The author ridicules the argument of some lovers of tokenism and also the RJD Chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, about making Mayawati or Ram Vilas Paswan, both of them Dalit, the next PM of the country on the lines of Obama, the first black President of United States.

The argument is totally baseless since Barack Obama has not been President of US because he is black, but because of his suitable qualifications for the post, his vision about America and his policy of de-emphasizing his racial identity. Other black politicians like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who stressed racial identity, are no where near the Presidential race. Lalu Yadav’s suggestion to make Mayawati or Paswan, the PM of India, is on the divisive lines of caste based politics. The top post of the country needs to be headed by someone who is secular as well as neutral on caste based lines. The argument for Narendra Modi for his non-qualification for PM is his Hindutva politics and Gujarat centric approach which will not unite India. 

Mayawati and Paswan would have also done lot of benefit to Dalits but then a PM should be someone who can reach out across the society and benefits all castes and religions.

Chanceless Ton

The article talks about the successful 100 days story of the Chandrayaan-1 mission of ISRO and the findings so far from the mission.

With an objective to determine Moon’s early history and evolution, Chandrayaan-1 has so far been hugely successful in conducting various tests and mappings (chemical and mineralogical) besides looking for water-ice in the permanently shadowed polar regions. Availability of water is necessary to establish a permanent Moon base in future. Helium-3 gas, if discovered, would be a possible replacement to fossil fuels in future. The probe has, so far, surpassed all performance expectations and instruments are running exceedingly well. The ISRO mission is expected to bring some unexpected information from the unexplored areas in order to settle a long time debate on Moon’s inception.

Earlier, 30 years back, the rocks that were brought revealed only the information so far that there is existence of water-ice on the surface. Hopefully the ISRO mission would bring results quicker.