Shri. P. Kunhalikutty states negativism has been the bane of Kerala

  

Accordingt to a statement by Shri. P. Kunhalikutty, the Honourable Minister for Industries and Information Technology, Government of Kerala, negativism has been the bane of the State.

Negativism anywhere by anybody is bad. In the Keralam context almost all here, are adept in weighing the pros and cons. 

Here the cons almost always outweigh the pros. 

Kuzhapamilla is our beacon. Pessimism is the guiding angel. Optimism is taboo. 

Once you cross the borders of Keralam the attitude shifts. 

Let me quote a superb example. There was Tamilian GM in the Kerala Office of a Pan India organization. Naturally, his office was staffed solely by Malayalees. One day this GM asked a simple question. "What is wrong with you Malayalee people. When you put up something to me for the final decision, you are all outlining the negatives first and then you follow it up with the positives. What I am asking is, why can't you put the positives first and the negatives, second. Why can't you reverse the order?" 

The implication is plain. Come whatever may, we are not interested in a positive outcome. 

As it is, we have an assured income - through salaries, wages, freebies, nokkucooly or anything else. We won't let anything scuttle it. 

We don't care if progress is stifled. 

We have to be safe. 

It is heard John Hopkins went straight to Singapore, when our people objected to their campus at Mattuppetty. If it is true, John Hopkins did not lose. 

Who lost is a mute question. 

For the people who matter Mayo Clinic is there. The state meets the expenses. 

For the rest it is apna, apna. 

Guess what happens to the people who don't matter, the haves and the have nots here. 

They have the wonderful opportunity to bid au revoir fast from this world of torments, torture, paucity and manipulations

FORMATION OF MUVATTUPUZHA DISTRICT

 

The Honourable Chief Minister of Kerala rently declared that the Government is contemplating the formation of Muvattupuzha District. 

It has been long overdue.

At present the areas upto Neriamangalam comes under Ernakulam District, we believe.

The area is vast. Exercising proper control over such a huge landmass is humanly impossible. Naturally the development of the area has suffered over the years. It remains backward.

Ernakulam district minus the proposed Muvattupuzh District has more than enough on hand. It has the Eloor Industrial area, Nedumbasserry Airport, Cochin Port, Infopark, Kochi Metro and a host of developmental initiative. Ernakulam District with its prent size is bursting at the seams. It certainly is unwieldy.

It is indeed good, the formation of Muvattupuzha District is being contemplated.

Coupled along with that Tiruvalla needs to be separated from Pathanamthitta District. If Kuttanadu and Chengannur are added to it to form another district it would work wonders  for the comprehensive development of the area. 

As it is Kuttanadu and Chenagnnur are parts of Alapuzha District. It is a very difficult trek for the people of Kuttanadu and Chenganuur to reach Alapuzha. But their proximity to Tiruvalla makes it easier for the people to access the District Head Quarters to approach the authorities for their needs. In the present juncture it is a herculean task for the administration at Alapuzha to look after the far way Kuttanadu and Chengannur. The consequence has been the backwardness of the area.

Tiruvalla at present is the most developed place in Kerala. Its needs are complex. It is imperative, it is carved out of Pathanamthitta. The district with its hilly tracts  has much more than it can chew.  

WHERE NECESSITY ENDS AND INDULGENCE BEGINS

 Excerpts from 'Politicians Paid More For Less Work' by Prabhu Chawla in the New Sunday Express of 23.08.2026

Aristotle believed that the strength of a republic ultimately rested on the character of those who governed it. 

Montesquieu warned that political power, left unchecked, had a natural tendency to expand beyond proper limits.

Edmund Burke, while defending the independence of elected representatives, reminded them that they owed their electors not merely their jobs but their judgement.

Nearly two and a half centuries after Burke, India's democracy has arrived at a rather different question. How much should the people have to pay for those who exercise power in their name?

John Locke believed that the purpose of government was to preserve the rights  of those who entrusted it with power. Burke saw representative government as a solemn understanding between the elected and the elector. 

Neither imagined that democracy would one day acquire the institutional paraphernalia of a corporate establishment, with its own hierarchy of salaries,allowances, vehicles, houses and privileges.

It is the truth that a facility meant to enable public service can easily become a perk which, once granted, has a remarkable tendency to become an entitlement. The citizen is meanwhile expected to accept that public expenditure must be restrained, subsidies must be rationalised and government departments must economise. The contrast is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.

Governments change, parties change and political rhetoric changes, yet once power is acquired, the political class appears to rediscover a common fraternity. Better cars,better houses, better salaries and better facilities for those who occupy legislatures. The citizen is perpetually reminded of fiscal prudence and the legislator, rather more often, of what the public purse can provide.

The real issue is whether the compensation attached to public office bears any relationship to the responsibilities discharged by those who receive it. 

The paradox is that the political class has become more expensive while the legislature itself has become less deliberative. 

State assemblies have, on an average, been meeting only for a fraction of an year. But when legislative time diminishes while political privileges expand, the citizen is entitled to ask whether the two trends can coexist. 

However there is an irony. The Indian voter is perhaps the most unforgiving auditor of political performance. Sitting legislators are routinely defeated. Anti-incumbency remains one of the most powerful weapon in Indian electoral politics. Yet the citizen has no effective mechanism to demand an account of what happens with the deployment of public funds. What is urgently needed is the establishment of  a credible compact between privilege and performance.

The danger that looms large is that political privilege will gradually become normalised across segements until nobody remebers to ask where necessity ends and indulgence begins. The language of public service can then become a convenient vocabulary for private comfort, while the tax payer is left to finance an increasingly elborate architecture of poiwer. 

Democracy cannot be adjudged by how generously it treats those who govern. It must ultimately be judged by how responsibly those who govern treat the money, institutions and the trust placed in their hands.

While going through the entire article, it was felt parallels could be drawn with the happenings in a Church for the past couple of years. It is left to the viewers to discern.

 

VISALAM - MADURAI - GOPALKRISHNA GANDHI

 GOPALKRISHNA GANDHI 

'Visalam' is a small street side Cafe in Madurai where you can have the best kaapi that can be had at a predawn hour.

T.Sadasivam, MS Subbulakshmi's husband had once told Gopalkrishna Gandhi,                          "If there is one place where you can get steaming, soft idlis and fresh hot kaapi even at 4 in the morning, it is Madurai."

Excerpts from Kumbakonam Via London, With Stopover in Madurai                                    in The New Sunday Express of 23.08.2026 by Gopalkrishna Gandhi

LN - GOPALKRISHNA GANDHI REMINISCES - LAKSHMI NARASIMHA RANGARAJAN IFS

LN - GOPALKRISHNA GANDHI REMINISCES - LAKSHMI NARASIMHA RANGARAJAN IFS

My family knew him well. In 1962, when LN was serving in the national capital between postings abroad, he once strode into our home in Delhi, cigarette glowing between his lips to 'just drop by for a cup of kaapi' - something no one does anymore. It so happened everyone but I was out. In order to not make me feel utterly valueless, he set me down to talk about the two subjects  I was studying in college. "Have you read anything by Toynbee?" he asked. I sheepishly admitted to having not read or even heard of the great writer. "What? And you say you are doing BA Honours in English Literature with history as a subsidiary? Shocking." And with that admonition, he proceeded to recite from memory, lines from Toynbee's 'A Study of History', "Not just because it is history, but for the language. Read the book and remember its priceless lines." Lesson over, he bade me goodbye.

The writer quotes a news item datelined London, August 14.

"Senior UK executive Gautam Rangarajan has been appointed adviser to Prime Minister Andy Burnham on structure and process." Gautam, said the report, has worked for BBC as group director for strategy and performance, with music as his forte. It added: he is a son of Ambassador LN Rangarajan and Joyce Rangarajan. Wow, I said to myselfr. Here we have our own LN's son advising the British PM, no less. The report also informed that Gautam's brother Vijay is chief executive of Britain's Electoral Commssion. Wow again.

Celebrating this news as I was, in came a mail from the nonagenarian Tamil and English writer 'Indira' Parthasarathi or EPaa, as he is known to his readers. Delighted like me by the news, he said that when he was a student at the Government Arts College in Kumbakonam during 1946-49, he read English literature from a teacher called Lakshminarasimha Iyengar. This venerable figure was not his teacher but a mentor. And he was, EPaa added, none other than the grandfather of Gautam Rangarajan and the father of LN Rangarajan.

EPaa said Lakshminarasimha Iyengar was so 'into' English literature that he had directed and staged Shakepeare's Antony and Cleopatra in Kumbakonam in 1948-49. "I was Cleopatra," EPaa wrote. And Lakshminarasimha Iyengar himself had played 'Antony'.

Lakshmi Narasimha Rangarajan is not a name many would recognise in India today. And even within the Indian Foreign Service, of which he was a shining star from 1956 to his death in 2013, many would not know him by that full name. But 'LN,' as Rangarajan was to friends and colleagues, was a redoubtable figure in the small world of scholar diplomats. LN was a scholar who became a diplomat. He remained a man of books while representing India in Greece, Sudan, Tunisia, Norway and Iceland.

Four decades later, after that admonition in 1962, I happened to move to Oslo and to the office he had held in the Nordic capital. One day I got a handwritten letter from LN in an aerogramme, a postal stationery all but extinct now. He had retired by then, with his gifted musician wife Joyce, to Rugby in Warwickshire, England. Not idling away his time, he achieved renown as the creator  of a staggeringly insightful English translation of Kautilya's Arthashastra

Giving me useful tips on the work involved in being India's Ambassador to Norway, LN asked me in the letter if I had learnt to ski, a classical Norwegian pastime. He said he used to ski from the ambassadors' residence to the embassy at times. Like in Delhi in 1962, I once again had to say, this time in 2002, that I had not, preferring to be driven safely to work and back by the embassy chauffeur. 

Excerpts from Kumbakonam Via London, With Stopover in Madurai                                    in The New Sunday Express of 23.08.2026 by Gopalkrishna Gandhi

DRESSED UP FOR ONAM CELEBRATION AT SAASVAP TECHNOPARK THIRUVANANTHAPURAM

                         DRESSED UP FOR ONAM CELEBRATION AT SAASVAP TECHNOPARK                                                              THIRUVANANTHAPURAM 
                                                              22 AUGUST 2026

ADAPTLY

 Adaptly is a rare adverb meaning in a suitable, convenient, or fitting manner. 

It is an archaic or uncommon variation derived from the root word adapt.

If you meant the more common words adapt or adaptively, they mean changing or adjusting to fit new conditions.

Core Definitions

Adaptly: Doing something in a fit or suitable way.

Adapt (Verb): To change yourself or an item for a new use

.Adaptively (Adverb): Acting in a way that successfully reacts to change.

Common Examples

Adaptly: Used in older texts to mean suitably.

Adapt: "You must adapt to the new schedule.

Adaptively: The body responds adaptively to stress.":