SINGH & CO GETS LISTED, FINALLY

THE “availability of talent” and “other considerations” were the key reasons why it took Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Congress leadership to finalise the council of ministers. In the end, Mr Singh described his 78-member council, as a “mixture of experience and energy”. Referring to the delay of nearly a week, Mr Singh said there was a need to be thorough. “Picking a Cabinet is a thorough exercise,” he said.

Elucidating, Mr Singh said there were several considerations while making the choice, which included the “availability of talent”. Discussing the reasons why there was no representation from Uttar Pradesh in his 38-member Cabinet, Mr Singh referred to “availability of talent” and “other considerations”. Several members of the previous Cabinet have been dropped. Sidestepping queries about the exclusion of senior members like HR Bhardwaj and Arjun Singh, the prime minister said: “There were other avenues of public service.” Indicating that the efforts would be made to accommodate senior party leaders who had been left out in his council of ministers.

Meanwhile, Congress president Sonia Gandhi reiterated the prime minister’s stress on performance. Virtually putting the newly-inducted party ministers on notice, she suggested that they either perform or perish. “Some of those who are inside can make way for others,” Ms Gandhi said. At the meeting of the Congress parliamentary party, Mr Singh had told Congress MPs that people expected a more efficient government and that “business as usual” will not do.

The following is the complete list of the Union Council of Ministers and their portfolios: MANMOHAN SINGH: Prime Minister,general administration, personnel, atomic energy CABINET MINISTERS Pranab Mukherjee: Finance AK Antony: Defence P Chidambaram: Home SM Krishna: External affairs Kapil Sibal: HRD Anand Sharma: Commerce & industry Mamata Banerjee: Railways Kamal Nath: Roads GK Vasan: Shipping Sushilkumar Shinde: Power Murli Deora: Petroleum A Raja: Telecom, IT Vilasrao Deskmukh: Heavy industries, PE Virbhadra Singh:Steel Dayanadhi Maran: Textiles M Veerappa Moily: Law Ambika Soni: I&B Sharad Pawar: Agriculture, consumer affairs, food & PDS Kumari Selja: Tourism, housing Pawan Kumar Bansal:Parliamentary affairs Ghulam Nabi Azad: Health S Jaipal Reddy: Urban development Vayalar Ravi: NRI affairs Meira Kumar: Water resources BK Handique: Mines, northeast development CP Joshi:Rural development, panchayati raj Farooq Abdullah: New/renewable energy Mallikarjun Kharge: Labour MS Gill: Sports, Youth affairs Subodh Kant Sahay: Food processing industries Mukul Wasnik:Social justice Kantilal Bhuria: Tribal affairs MK Azhagiri: Chemicals & fertilisers MINISTERS OF STATE WITH INDEPENDENT CHARGE Praful Patel: Civil aviation Prithviraj Chavan: S&T & also MoS in PMO, parliamentary affairs Sriprakash Jaiswal: Coal, statistics and programme implementation Salman Khurshid: Corporate affairs, minority affairs Dinsha Patel: Micro, small & medium enterprises Krishna Tirath: Women and child development Jairam Ramesh: Environment and forests MINISTERS OF STATE Shashi Tharoor: External affairs Preneet Kaur: External affairs Ajay Maken: Home Mullappally Ramachandran: Home NN Meena: Finance SS Palanimanickam: Finance MM Pallam Raju:Defence Jyotiraditya Scindia: Commerce & industry Gurudas Kamath: Telecom, IT Sachin Pilot: Telecom, IT E Ahmed: Railways K H Muniyappa: Railways Jitin Prasada: Petroleum D Puran Deswari: HRD Srikanth Jena: Chemicals & fertilisers Saugata Ray: Urban development V Narayanasamy: Planning, parliamentary affairs Panabaka Lakshmi: Textiles A Sai Prathap: Steel Harish Rawat: Labour KV Thomas: Agriculture, PDS Bharatsinh Solanki: Power Mahadev Khandela: Roads RPN Singh: Roads Dinesh Trivedi: Health S Gandhiselvan: Health Sisir Adhikari: Rural development Pradeep Jain: Rural development Agatha Sangma: Rural development Sultan Ahmed: Tourism Mohan Jatua: I&B Dr S Jagathrakshakan: I&B Mukul Roy: Shipping D Napoleon:Social justice Tusharbhai Chaudhary: Tribal affairs Arun Yadav: Sports, youth affairs Prateek Patil: Heavy industry & PE Vincent Pala: Water resources

wordle

Previous week while surfing I came across a wonderfull word jumbling website- wordle.net and thought of sharing it.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

A voter in search of a candidate

Past few weeks we can see election fever everywhere, candidates busy in campaigning and the party members busy arranging rallies here and there and everywhere in the country. This is toughest time for the ministers and candidates as they have to wander in this hot summer in rural areas to vow the public, making baseless promises to people to get vote.

This time the elections were not the same as earlier, as many NGO and student community comin forward and aspiring people to vote; more focused towards the younger generation. We can see many campaign and cartels made to promote people to vote for elections like vote for India.

One of the funniest thing in the election season is that we can see the amazing creativity of the cartoonists with there state of art sculptures in the newspapers and magazines depicting some of the ministers and candidates, have I mentioned the blaming game where the members of the either party blame each other for the any damn mis-happenings, rising prices, terrorists attack, bla bla bla…. (Lot more). The opposition need just a small reason where by something goes wrong to pull the leg of the ruling party and to highlight the issue as the main election agenda. Also the candidates make some funny comments on each other.

Recently a new trend has emerged after the shoe attack on George bush, that is shoe hitting. The trend is so popular that it has been tried on some of the renowned ministers in India like Manmohan singh, L K Advani, P Chidambaram. The ministers have got shoe-phobia these days and while giving speech in public gathering they are more focused and cautious on the shoe thing rather than the speech.

Today the campaign are emphasizing people to vote; despite of all campaigns and the awakening messages, there were less than 50% of voter casting vote in Mumbai itself. There is a reason behind this- Are there right candidate worth to vote for? Most of the politicians are having criminal cases on them, the rest are corrupt, other are so old busy to get treatment for themselves rather than treating the illness of the country, one candidate only wants to hang Afzal Guru, another is bothered about India's unused uranium deposits, someone else is worried about security, the other about defence deals and yet another about corruption or rather, corrupt people in politics and yet other want to bring back the Indian money from the swiss account. For some, it's not clear what exactly they represent. Some of these issues are important and others do not really fall under the umbrella of influence which an ordinary MP has.

Do we have candidates who truly represent us, no matter how diverse, different, intelligent, silly, emotional, irrational, scientific, religious, greedy, rich or poor we are? Yes, there are times when we vote for or against this or that party because some party appeals to us and some parties fill us with loathing.

The people have lost their faith on the Indian politics system. It's become a bit of a downer as a voter. You can't, it seems, really go by the candidate. And, as it happens according to surveys, 60 per cent of the electorate knows that -- it votes by party. There is a tendency of the people to vote for the particular party, without knowing the candidate. They should know the candidate and vote for the right candidate rather than voting for the party.

Under these circumstances, the search for the good candidate has left me flummoxed. There is a need of overhauling in the current political system in India and more and more young generations to take participate in the political system and contribute towards the country. As together we will and we can lead to a prosperous country and developed nation.