IAF nod to night take-offs for India Pakistan match at Mohali

India's top corporate bosses and Bollywood stars can heave a sigh of relief as Indian Air force authorities ( IAF) have permitted late night take- offs for their private jets/ chartered flights from the restricted Chandigarh airport.

VIPs and business tycoons will be in the city on Wednesday to watch the high voltage India-Pakistan World Cup semi- final at Mohali.

They will, however, not be allowed to park their aircraft at the defence airport because of limited bays. The private jets will have to drop their passengers, fly back to Delhi, Ambala or Amritsar and pick them up late in the evening.

It was earlier reported that the IAF was “not too happy” about extending night operations to accommodate private flights for the day and night cricketing spectacle. The airport shuts down after 8 pm, but top business tycoons were keen to fly back the same night.

“ As it is an international event, the airport will be open after 8 pm, till the early morning hours. The request for private aircraft/ chartered flights has increased to around 40,” a senior IAF official said.

According to Airport Authority of India / IAF officials, the chartered aircrafts will be accommodated between the slots available to scheduled flights. Business houses which have put in requests include Reliance Group, Jindal and Bhushan Steel.

RIL Chairman Mukesh Ambani, along with his family members is expected to be present for the high profile event.

DDA application status now available for the applicants

Delhi Development Authority (DDA) working on its own pace has now made available the application status of the applicants who applied for the draw of 16,000 flats in the last month of 2010. Applicants can now check their application status on the official website of DDA to make sure that application has been accepted and would be featuring in the draw which is scheduled in the last week of April, 2011.

DDA officials earlier had made it mandatory that the deposit and then the complete amount are only made from a single bank account. “ The income tax department will be apprised of all the buyers’ details. If discrepancies are noticed in the forms, we will forward the details to police,” said a DDA official.

The flats on offer are lucrative as they are below the prevailing market rates by 50 to 80 per cent, officials said. While the cheapest flats are available at Rs 1,536 per square feet, the expensive ones are priced at Rs 6,069 square feet. The draw for the flats will be held by April 2011.

While 17.5 per cent of the flats were reserved for Scheduled Castes, 7.5 per cent of them will go to Scheduled Tribes and 1 per cent each for war widows, physically handicapped and ex- servicemen.

No official information has been made public on the number of forms which are rejected due to the discrepancy found in the information entered in the forms.

Joseph Lelyveld new book claims Mahatma Gandhi was bisexual, racist

A new book by Pulitzer Prize winning author Joseph Lelyveld titled Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India, claims that Gandhi was bisexual and left his wife, Kasturba, to live with Hermann Kallenbach, the German- born Jewish architect who became his acolyte and financier of the Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg.

Joseph Lelyveld’s hypothesis that Mahatma Gandhi left Kasturba to spend two years with his architect associate Hermann Kallenbach to further an alleged homosexual relationship, exposes a complete disregard for facts.

The Mahatma, according to Australian Gandhian scholar Thomas Weber, shared Kallenbach’s house, six miles from Johannesburg, at the height of his agitation against the racist Transvaal Asiatic Registration Act, which was enacted to get rid of Indians from South Africa. To concentrate on his campaign, Gandhi cut back on his hugely successful law practice, which partly funded the movement, and abandoned his Johannesburg home in a fashionable neighbourhood to keep his expenses down.

Like all decisions Gandhi took in his public life, it was driven by pragmatism. And Kasturba, as South African historian Kalpana Hiralal of the University of Kwazulu-Natal has shown, took charge of the Phoenix Settlement near Durban because her husband had no time for it.

When the Transvaal government incarcerated Gandhi for two months in January 1908, Kasturba, “in solidarity with her hus- band, lived on a diet of unsalted, unsweetened, unflavoured cornmeal mush or ‘mealie pap’.”

When he heard Kasturba’s health had deteriorated, Gandhi wrote from jail: “A great pain nibbles my heart. I am full of sorrow yet I cannot come and serve you.” These are not the words of a man who had deserted his wife to be with his “male lover”.

A wealthy architect who had developed upscale townships around Johannesburg, and financed the 1,100-acre Tolstoy Farm as a community for satyagraha volunteers and their families, Kallenbach met Gandhi in 1903. The man who brought them together was a barrister and co-secretary of the Natal Indian Congress, R.K. Khan. Gandhi made Kallenbach, a lifelong bachelor who called Kasturba ‘Mother’ and doted on the Mahatma’s four sons (his friend banned him from giving his children expensive toys!), give up his expensive ways as well as turn his back on alcohol and tobacco.

Writing in 1929 about their time together, Gandhi recounted how, under his influence, Kallenbach “reduced himself to such simplicity” that his monthly expenses on himself came down from Rs.1,200, “over and above house rent”, to Rs.120.

In The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Gandhi says Kallenbach was convinced he “must carry out in his life the changes I was making in mine”. Referring to their time together in his other book, Satyagraha in South Africa, he writes: “He would be hurt if I offered to pay him my share of the household expenses, and would plead that I was responsible for considerable savings in his domestic economy.”

Had the hyper-confessional Gandhi nurtured any feelings for Kallenbach other than bonhomie, he would have devoted reams on the subject. Instead, he just presents a loving account of their friendship that lasted much after he had left South Africa.

Gilani pads up for India Pakistan Semi Final at Mohali

Paksitani Prime Minister Syed Yusaf Raza Gilani will visit India to watch the World Cup semi- final in Mohali on Wednesday, President Asif Ali Zardari’s aide said. Farhatullah Babar, Zardari’s spokesman, said Gilani’s visit was finalised late on Saturday after the PM met the president following his return from Uzbekistan.

Sources in the presidency said Gilani and Zardari discussed the invitation by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to both. “ Protocol suggests that Gilani should visit as the invitation has come from the Indian PM,” a source said, describing how the decision was made. They also discussed whether the visit should be kept informal or made a substantial event to take forward the process of bilateral dialogue.

“ The visit will be utilised to expedite the process of normalisation of Indo- Pak ties and as a precursor to the resumption of the composite dialogue,” the source said. The other issue discussed was whether Gilani should take a sizeable delegation with him.

“ This has been left undecided for now and will be finalised after talks between members of the federal cabinet, the ruling coalition and the Opposition parties,” the source added. “ The PM may ask some senior Opposition politicians to accompany him.” Indian government sources said they expected at least a dozenmember strong delegation with Gilani. The team may include Pakistan’s minister of state for foreign affairs Hina Rabbani Khar, foreign secretary Salman Bashir and information minister Ashiq Awan.

This could mean India may send foreign secretary Nirupama Rao with the PM to watch the match. Analysts have welcomed the developments. “ Even if the visit ends up as a symbolic gesture, I support it because it is coming after the two sides have shied away from direct bilateral visits at the highest level for many years,” Dr Hasan Askari Rizi, a political scientist based in Lahore, said.

“ Cricket being the common passion, the match should become an occasion where the two sides start seeing how much we have in common and how much we lose by stressing upon differences,” Dr Muhammad Waseem, another Lahore- based analyst, said.