Indicast - Indians on India

We are back after what has been the longest hiatus in the last 5 years that we have been doing Indicast. We start the episode taking about the top stories that we missed while we were away and then move on with the current affairs. This weeks stories include the successful Agni V test, The Aids train, Akaash tablets fail, Yuvraaj Singh returning back to India and Gandhi memoribilia still getting fetching big bucks.

Mumbai elections came and went. The 13th municipal elections since independence saw the BJP-Shiv Sena combo come into power for the fourth consecutive term. Mumbaikars however chose to stay at home and had just 46 per cent voter turnout. Down south in Karnataka, three ministers resign after they were caught watching porn at job. According to one poll, Indians are the among the happiest people on earth. In sports, Yuvraj Singh who has been diagnosed with tumor is recovering in a hospital at Boston.

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This episode is full high and low points for India. While India got thrashed by Australia in the cricket, India, with a lot of help from many organizations, has achieved to be Polio free for an entire year. The later is a lot more important than cricket so it not really a fair comparison. There are a few more such topic in this episode.

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Welcome to the first episode of the year 2012. We begin our episode with our ramblings about how cold it has been in India and we somehow manage to figure out the meaning of lyrics for one of Govindas hit song. The topics that we cover in this episode include the update on UP elections, Bhaichund Bhutia playing his last match, Kingfishers woes continuing, $1 doctor visits for urban poor and Indias dismal performance in Australia.

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Time magazine put the protester on the front page of its Person of the Year issue. 2011 was truly a year of revolutions and we sum up some of them in this podcast. This year also saw some astonishing inventions in the world of Physics. A few weeks ago some scientists claimed that some particle can indeed travel faster than light. A few days back physicists have finally seem to have put their finger on what is called the God particle. In India, such news is being pushed to the back pages of the papers as the front page generally is dedicated to the falling rupee and its effects to Indians in India and outside.

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Kapil Sibal is not the first Indian politician to trend on Twitter, but perhaps the first one to trend with a dubious adjective (or noun, whatever), idiot. His lack of knowledge about how the internet works was evident when he asked companies like Facebook and Google to prescreen content which is posted by Indian users after he found a few morphed pictures of Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh which showed them in bad light. This year has seen quite a rew RIPs and Dev Anand and Indira Goswami get added to the list. In cricket, Sehwag scores a double century and if you are in Maharashtra, beware of those 500 rupee notes - they could just be fake!

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Right from the days when trade was in barter format, the retail world has always been exciting. In the west, it has graduated from mom and pop stores to big box. The Indian government believed that India too should ape the movement, and has rejigged the Foreign Direct Investment rules in the retail sector. The opposition was not amused. In other corporate news, Cyrus Mistry will take over from Ratan Tata in December 2013. In the science field, the world's lightest material caught Adityas fancy and he gives us an overview.

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Mayawati has follows a strict routine for ensuring to make it to the front pages of Indian newspapers at least once a week. This time she succeeds in convincing her party to pass a resolution demanding four different states. In Himachal Pradesh, more than 800 women have been reported missing in the past few years. The Unhate Benetton advertising campaign was the most talked about news story in business and in science, a startling discovery that one can travel faster than the speed of light just came to light.

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Kingfisher is all over the place. Thats the news that everyone is feeding on especially in the business newspapers. Vijay Mallyas airline company has declared its 16 straight quarterly loss and things are not about to improve in the short term. In politics, Rahul Gandhi is now been slated to be the next man in charge as he contests elections in Uttar Pradesh. Government will soon be launching a Right to Education Act which promises education to every kid upto 14 years of age. In world news, floods in Thailand have set the country back. In cricket, South Africa and Australia slug it out in test matches and India is on a roll. At the time of the recording, Dravid, Laxman and Dhoni had scored centuries in the second test.

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We start off this episode by talking a bit about the noise surrounding the Armed Forces Special Power Act which was established back in 1958. It turns out that Omar Abdullah wants it revoked in Jammu and Kashmir for it gives the army right to arrest and sometimes kill without the need of a warrant or necessary paperwork. In other news, Bhupen Hazarika and Joe Fraiser passed away this week and the mystery surrounding Michael Jackson's death was finally out when his personal physician was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

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