MUMBAI, the financial, commercial and entertainment nerve centre of India, has been under serious distress because of the COVID-19 pandemic.Mumbai generates 33 per cent of the country’s income tax, 60 per cent of custom duty, 20 per cent of central excise duty, and 40 per cent of the foreign trade, 25 per cent of industrial output, 70 per cent of capital formation, 10 per cent of factory employment. The city is one of the top 10 centres of global financial flow, contributing over 6 per cent of India’s GDP.

A FASCIST leader wants to leave an imprint of his glory; the footprint does not just limit to the polity, rather extends to a wide spectrum that includes art and architecture. If the construction of Volksshalle was the idea of Hitler, designed and planned by Albert Speer, the proposal of construction of a new parliament building along with the redevelopment of the Central Vista in Delhi by Modi and his prime architect, Bimal Patel is another parallel, to a similar idea.

SINCE the very outset, thousands of migrant workers with the back breaking huge sacks trudging along, often with wives and children for hundreds of kilometers have been the unputdownable images that have refused to leave us. Since the abrupt announcement of the national lockdown with a notice of four hours, such images have come to haunt us. Thousands of migrant workers at the Anand Vihar bus station immediately after the announcement marked their arrival in the increasingly intense discourse on our response to Covid pandemic.

APRIL 22, 2020, marks the 150th birth anniversary of the greatest revolutionary figure of the twentieth century, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. After Marx and Engels, Lenin made the biggest contribution to the theory and practice of Marxism. Lenin’s groundbreaking theoretical advances, such as his analysis of imperialism, set the stage for the world’s first socialist revolution in Russia in October 1917.Lenin created a revolutionary strategy that encompassed the industrial proletariat and the peoples of the colonies and oppressed countries.

THE people were looking forward to the prime minister’s address to the nation on the last day of the three-week countrywide lockdown.  These three weeks have thrown up many experiences that need to be addressed urgently in order, both, to strengthen our fight against the Covid 19 pandemic and to protect the lives and survival of crores of our fellow citizens.  On none of these issues of vital importance did the prime minister have anything substantial to say.