For nearly five months in late 2016 and early 2017, I had a sinking feeling that something was desperately wrong with my 10-year-old daughter, but the doctors and specialists we visited during that time didn't have any answers.
The new favourite of the Prime Minister appears to be Piyush Goyal. Like Arun Jaitley before him, he is the new superman in the cabinet. He is today in charge of Coal, Railways, and on top of it all, the Minister is Finance and Corporate Affairs.
After Rahul Gandhi's ambush-by-hug, Prime Minister Narendra Modi confronts more frenemy-type action: Ram Vilas Paswan, whose instinct for political shape-shifting is legion, has, along with his son, Chirag, has abandoned his thus-far model ally behaviour.
For us in India, the near-universal rejection of Pakistan's religion-based parties is perhaps the most significant outcome of this election - for it demonstrates (once again) that far from being partisans of fanatical Islamic terrorists, Pakistanis, by and large, reject religious extremism and terror politics.
As outrage rises over cow-related lynchings, the government has responded by appointing a high-level committee to study the growing menace. They have also issued an advisory asking states to rein in the violence, the second in a month.
Hence his denigration of a gesture aimed at indicating that in a democracy we have opponents not enemies, that we do not have to harbour hatred in our hearts against those with whom we do not agree. Modi-Shah do not understand that.
For the BJP, while Prime Minister Narendra Modi turned in his usual aggressive performance, it would be an irritant that the PM was essentially upstaged by Rahul Gandhi and his made-for-TV hug - followed by that wink.
The BJP won the vote of no-confidence with ease but that was not the takeaway from the debate. Gandhi with his unconventional move had the floor, the headlines and the image that everyone would be left with.
For the first time, he looked comfortable in his skin as a politician. They kept booing him, they kept criticising him, and shouting him down, but the "reluctant" politician was on a roll.
When deployed as a tool to unlock your phone, facial recognition may be a convenience. When used by a company to tag you in photos, the technology may raise questions of privacy, consent and data security.
The people of India revel in asking who next. Like "After Nehru, who?", "After Indira, who?", "After Rajiv, who?", and today, "After Modi, who?" Every time they themselves provide the answer to this question.
The new CWC indicates that this will remain the forte ofexperienced hands like Patel and Azad. So this is not a misadventure for Rahul Gandhi. It just isn't a whole lot.
China and India have been stepping up their summit diplomacy. It is necessary to pay close attention to the impact that their bilateral relationship, beset with thorny territorial problems, will have on Asia's security environment.
As a self-confessed "secular fundamentalist", I believe this is the time and juncture for me to stand up and say that Shashi Tharoor is spot on: the Bharat which the Hindutva forces are pledged to realize would be a mirror image of Muslim Pakistan, thus making of secular India a 'Hindu Pakistan'.
There has been much talk lately of opposition parties uniting to face the BJP juggernaut in the next Lok Sabha elections. It stands to reason that they should do so since there is no other way of unseating the present government.
