India Today Monday, March 20, 2023

My wife is a dog lover. I am, by and large, a benign bystander. We have kept dogs for several decades. Recently, I have noticed this love of hers is burning a bigger hole in my pocket. The kind of services that are now available for pets is mind-boggling. I should be thankful for small mercies: my wife does not use all these services. The bustling ancillary industry takes in everything from essential commodities like pet food and specialised pet vets to high-end luxuries like pet gourmet food and pet fashion that includes lehengas and bikinis (make sure you choose the right colour) and pet spas. At its core is an attitudinal shift. Those who keep dogs are no longer mere ‘dog owners’—they like to call themselves ‘dog parents’. This…

The Centre’s nod to renaming Aurangabad and Osmanabad as Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar and Dharashiv, respectively has led to more demands in Maharashtra for cities and regions to be rechristened. In fact, some of these sites are also seeing more than one claim, which may lead to a fresh round of competitive identity politics and social tensions, especially with elections to the local bodies, Lok Sabha and state assembly all coming up one after the other in the next two years. There’s also a small, vocal group protesting this bid to create a new history with this renaming spree. Their cause may be strengthened by the Supreme Court, which threw out a petition by BJP leader Ashwini Upadhyay who wanted the Centre to set up a ‘renaming commission’ to find the original…

↘ In 1994, after a 16-year agitation, Marathwada University in Aurangabad was renamed DR BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR MARA TH WADA UNIVERSITY. Schisms have still not healed ↘ The most significant renaming was BOMBAY TO MUMBAI (1995) by the then Shiv Sena-BJP government. Later, the iconic Victoria Terminus (VT) station and the airport were named after Chhatrapati Shivaji ↘ The Elphinstone Road railway station in Mumbai was renamed PRABHADEVI (2018) and University of Pune after SAVITRIBAI PHULE (2014) for the contributions Mahatma Jyotiba and wife Savitribai Phule made to the cause of educating women and non-Brahmins ↘ Maharashtra’s lone Muslim CM, A.R. Antulay, renamed Kulaba district RAIGAD in the early 1980s. Raigad was the fort-capital of Shivaji …THE NEW DEMANDS ↘ Pune to Jijaunagar ↘ Ahmednagar to Punyashlok Ahilyadevi Nagar ↘ Aurangabad airport after Chhatrapati Sambhaji ↘ Churchgate railway station…

Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath revels in the ‘Bulldozer baba’ image he has built for himself, but the events of the past couple of weeks will have knocked it down a few notches. The fortnight saw two high-profile cases where three people were killed, which has led to people questioning the Yogi narrative—of him being the tough, straight-shooting marshal who cleaned up a bad town, so to speak. In the first case, 46-year-old Pramila Dixit and her daughter Neha, 22, were killed during an anti-encroachment “bulldozer action” on February 13. In the second, Umesh Pal, the prime witness in the 2005 murder case of Bahujan Samaj Party MLA Raju Pal, was shot dead outside his house in Prayagraj on February 24. Two of the five UP policemen in his security…

The results might have been different but for the alliance of the Left parties and Congress for the Tripura assembly polls and the byelections for the Sagardighi assembly seat in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district. It surely raised the hackles of their main electoral opponents, the BJP and the Trinamool Congress. PM Narendra Modi, on the final day of campaigning in Tripura, warned voters that “old players of misgovernance have joined hands…even a single vote for them will take Tripura backwards”. Bitter rivals during the 25-year Left rule in Tripura, the alliance did initially leave the arriviste BJP disconcerted, especially since its main agenda was to split the anti-BJP/anti-incumbency votes. In the event, the BJP need not have worried: it won a majority on its own, winning 32 seats. Equally interesting…

India’s food security may be staring at a crisis this year. At the centre of this is the rising mercury that has sent alarm bells ringing in the wheat-producing belts in states such as Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar and Gujarat. The consistently higher-than-normal temperatures during this critical time in the wheat crop cycle are likely to adversely impact the government’s output estimates. According to the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), February 2023 was the warmest since 1901. The maximum temperature reached 29.54 degrees Celsius—1.7 degrees higher than normal. The farm community apart, policymakers, too, are concerned given that lower production of wheat would have a cascading effect on Public Distribution System (PDS) planning, food inflation and, eventually, the general economic scenario. This week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took…