For us from Mangalore it is hard to accept at a Catholic monastery could have been attacked. On Sunday (Sept 14) morning, I got an SMS from a friend there that St Clarie's Monastery had been attacked by about 20-25 youth, presumably belonging to the Bajrang Dal. The nuns there belong to a cloistered group. The monastery is in the city centre and the hoodlums apparently pulled down the sacrament, broke a cross, tore hymn books, damaged a statue encased in glass and beat up the worshippers. Around that time a Church of South India outfit a few kilometers away, in Lalbag, was attacked and so was a New Life Centre in the adjoining district of Udupi. As I write , my friends tell me that people have thronged Milagres Chuch (the parish where St Claire's is located) in response to the emergency pealing of bells. It was with a sense of disquiet that I returned from Mangalore a few days back. The...

Even those who do not agree with Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi's divisive politics, and I am one of them, admire his administrative skills. In July, I interviewed him for a TV series called Government At Work, which seeks to dispel the notion that government uniformly does not deliver and the apparatus of governance has become too rigid to encourage innovation. We focused on some district-level initiatives that have either been nominated, or have won, the Prime Minister's award for excellence in public administration. Two of the initiatives that we reviewed were from Gujarat - the Janseva Kendras of Ahmedabad that are a one-stop shop for government services, including land records, and the kitchen gardens attached to Baroda anganwadis which have made green leafy vegetables inexpensively available to children and expectant mothers, raising haemoglobin levels and boosting immunity. These initiatives taken by D Thara (currently deputy municipal commissioner of Ahmedabad), M Thennarasan (now collector of Sabarkantha district) and R J Patel (now district collector...

I have covered WTO minister-level meetings in Cancun in 2003, in Hong Kong in 2005 and this time in Geneva. All of them ended in failure, disappointment and anger, but the feeling this time was of profound sadness. United States Trade Representative was so overwhelmed with emotion that she left without completing her sentence while speaking to the media soon after the talks broke down. A little later, EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fisher Boel choked on her words during a press conference with EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, who described the failure as "absolutely heartbreaking." Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said he was "disappointed." As one of the persons blamed for being inflexible, he might have been trying to put up a brave front. I am sure he felt a deeper sense of loss. The whole thing came unstuck over the issue of special safeguards mechanism. These are defences in the form of additional duties that about a hundred developing countries, led by...

For five days, till last Friday, the WTO talks in Geneva produced fresh terminology, instead of progress. The negotiations were mainly among seven principal members - the US, EU, Japan, Australia, China, Brazil and India - described by WTO director-general Pascal Lamy as the "variable geometry" of the talks. Those who protested at being kept waiting in the wings, were told the process would move in "concentric circles". An agreement among the seven would have to be ratified by the wider body. The seven members did produce a compromise on 25th July, that made EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson gush that a deal seemed closer than at any time in the seven years time since the Doha round began. Three days later the blame game and finger pointing has begun. Without naming them US Trade Representative Susan Schwab has accused India and China of unraveling the Friday package. After Brazil broke ranks, the US and EU had hoped that...