Syed Firdaus Ashraf covers national politics, and sometimes movies too -- a truly wide arc! You can e-mail the author at firdausa@rediff.co.in
'I am not sure of the numbers killed, but they were not as high as the use of the word 'genocide' suggests.' 'There is another meaning you could take, 'cultural genocide', in that the Pandit community is extremely small and their forced departure led to a wiping out of their culture.'
'Every Congress leader in UP and the rest of India is calling me and thanking me that finally someone spoke about this JNU gang ruling the Congress party in UP.'
'The Congress can exist without (someone from) the Nehru-Gandhi family being its president.'
'Yogi was there, but ultimately the BJP got extremely worried and therefore Modi pitched in.'
'That would be very bad for them and suicidal for both the Gandhis and the Congress party.'
'Had the Congress made Sidhu its CM face, they would have won 80 out of 117 seats.'
'Akhilesh did politics like Rabi and Kharif crop which come once a year. Politics is not seasonal, you have to harvest your field all through the year and only then you get a good crop' Political analyst lists 12 reasons why Akhilesh Yadav lost the UP elections.
''I had no idea that my life would turn into a horror show.' 'I was stuck as the Russians kept bombing Kyiv non-stop.'
'In many cases, I didn't take money because the Indian students had run out of cash.' 'The biggest high was the blessings that these students's parents used to give me on the phone or send messages thanking me on WhatsApp.'
'There has been no help that has come from the Indian embassy till date. We have no idea when we all will be evacuated.'
'We request the Indian government that they send some buses urgently so that we can travel in groups and reach safety.'
'We are trying to trace them.' 'We feel their phone batteries must have died because they are travelling by road.'
'With over 50 per cent of medical seats reserved for those who have the ability to pay a fee ranging from Rs 50 lakh to Rs 1.5 crore for a five-year MBBS course and quotas in accordance with affirmative policies in government colleges, the band of seats available for the not-so-rich and non-OBCs is very narrow.'
'Putin has set aside all the rules and now he is deciding the rules.'
Over 1,200 Indian students stranded at Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine make a desperate call for help.
'There is a cost to war.' 'The West knows that and so does Putin.' 'The point is, how much of the cost are both sides willing to pay?'
'This issue is related to national security because they were compromising the entire capital markets's core infrastructure by leaking confidential information.' 'What would have happened if the servers had come down?' 'Or some confidential information leaked to terrorists who could have knocked out our capital market?'
'The Indian government evacuated its citizens from the clutches of the Taliban and Covid-hit Wuhan, so I am not worried.'
'At present there might be at least 500 Indians stuck in Iran for various reasons and we have no idea when they will come back.'
'It will take a long time for people's memory to be misled by a prime minister who is so arrogant and who refuses to acknowledge his own faults.'
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