The recent power tariff hike has thrown the spotlight on the quality of services offered by Tangedco. Many consumers may not mind paying higher tariffs to keep Tangedco in business but would prefer that the services rendered match the charges they pay for the power. Many households across the...
Madurai Rajan was a journalist’s delight. A Dalit rights activist, he knew what reporters wanted and had the knowledge, sources, access and guts to take them to the story when Tamil Nadu was rocked by caste conflict in the mid-1990s. Rajan’s house was in a Pariar colony in Madurai. It had a...
In 1975-76, as the DMK raised the heat against the central government and opposed the Emergency, TN secession from the rest of the country was among the topics that dominated the discourse. Tamil Nadu’s secession cropped up in the despatches and reports sent by US diplomats in then Madras to...
Vikram was the coolest Tamil movie of the 1980s. We knew India made rockets that went into space. But the rocket in Vikram could be used to attack other countries. It could even carry a nuclear weapon. Really? India in the mid-1980s made missiles? India had nuclear weapons? Cool! The Buddha...
During any temple car procession, the standard operating procedure of the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board is to switch off the power in the overhead cables in the streets through which the procession will pass through, said P Muthusamy, former director of engineering at the Tamil Nadu Electricity...
After Ilaiyaraja, it’s now the turn of Bhagyaraj to endorse Narendra Modi. The BJP has certainly hit the bull’s eye as far as their choice of film personalities to back them goes. Ilaiyaraja is not just a celebrity but he is someone Tamils see as one of their own, a man so rooted that he...
Who is Dravidian is a perennial question in Tamil public life. Even the Ilaiyaraja controversy has meandered to that question. The Ilaiyaraja row is not a naturally occurring event that is the job of journalists to uncover and write about. It is a staged event orchestrated to create hype,...
The current crisis in Sri Lanka makes us wonder where Sri Lankan Tamils would be now if Prabhakaran had settled for peace at some point. At the beginning of the Fourth Eelam War that destroyed him and his organization, he said the Sri Lankan government was just not genuinely interested in...
Marking the 7th anniversary of the launch of the PMMY Mudra Loans scheme last week, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, “It is noteworthy that more than 34.42 crore loan accounts amounting to Rs.18.60 lakh crore have been opened under the Scheme for the creation of income generating...
Mudra loans have been touted as a gamechanger in making unsecured credit available to those engaged in small businesses who are outside the corporate sector. Launched in 2015, the Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana (PMMY) provides loans up to Rs 10 lakh to non-corporate, non-farm small/micro...
