Bread and games in India

In the final years of the Roman Republic, the Senate kept the masses happy by distributing cheap food and staging big spectacles known as the circus games to get votes. In his satires, the Roman poet Juvenal observed witheringly that governance had been reduced to panem et circenses (bread and circus/games). He was referring to the Roman practice of giving free wheat to its citizens and mounting costly games as a means of gaining power, a practice adopted later by the Roman emperors. Entry to the games was also free.

The new banana republic

All governments need to be watched. You never know when one of them will slip in a nasty tax on the quiet or pass a seemingly simple notification that can be the undoing of entire communities or of the environment. That is the nature of the beast. But how vigilant can people be with a government that will try to alter the entire complexion of a critical law-in-the-making by sneakily replacing a clear-cut ‘or’ with a lethal ‘and’—under the very noses of the MPs opposed to legislation?

Waking up to ACTA

India is finally sounding the alarm on a secretive pact by a cabal of rich nations to ramp up IP enforcement measures Latha Jishnu / Business Standard / New Delhi June 10, 2010

The war for intellectual property

Developed countries have new campaigns to dominate global access to knowledge Latha Jishnu / Business Standard / New Delhi May 9, 2009

Policy of encirclement

Latha Jishnu / Business Standard / New Delhi January 30, 2009 Rich nations are using every forum available to step up intellectual property curbs on developing country exports.

Choking India's generics exports

Latha Jishnu / Business Standard / New Delhi January 29, 2009 The EU and WHO are pursuing strategies that will have serious consequences for developing countries, warns Latha Jishnu