THE town that is called Ayodhya in Valmiki’s Ramayana, as well as today, was known as Awadh in pre-British times. Tulsidas in his Ramcharit Manas called it Awadh-puri. It was a large city, capital of the province that was also called Awadh. It had, therefore, a large Muslim population. So it was that when Babur established the Mughal Empire in India in 1526, and Awadh or Ayodhya fell into his hands, his governor Mir Baqi built a large mosque there, which came to be known as the Babri Masjid.

WHEN the slogan of ‘Vikas’ does not work, resort to the son of the soil argument to enchant people: this is the tenor that Narendra Modi seems to have adopted as he and his cabinet ministers aggressively campaign in Gujarat at the apex of the poll campaign. The BJP is not only invoking Gujarati nationalism, but is also accusing the opposition which is questioning the Gujarat model of development of siding with ‘terrorists’ and ‘casteist’ people.

THE world’s scientific community, especially astronomers and cosmologists, is abuzz about the signals from a mega event that rang, quite literally, not only around the globe but also beyond it. This was the “sighting” of a collision between two neutron stars 130 million light years away! What was so significant about it that it took the scientific community by storm and led to unprecedented messaging and tweeting all across the globe?

Day – Minus six months: My mother was taken to a hospital. A test was done. They found out I was inside her womb. My father and his parents forced her to a surgery. I was killed, before I could see you.

Day – My birth: I had just come out of my mother’s womb. I was crying. They saw me. Instead of milk, the put some seeds in my mouth. My birthday was my death day.

November 22, 2015: I was three months old. My uncle who is 50 years old took me away from my house where I was sleeping. He raped and killed me.

NEO-LIBERAL economic policies are set to unbound the Indian Railways, the country’s largest public transport. “Rail by market and not by the government” is the mantra of the Modi regime. The Indian Railways is crying for funds for capacity expansion and safety, but the government refuses to acknowledge it. Why should this network be a “Sarkari monolith”? -- is the argument forwarded by the propagators of its privatisaion.

The Debroy Committee Report