Hurray! A supermajority in the senate passes its version of the health care reform bill. The drama has been intense and there have been many moments when it seemed like talk of death panels and communism would defeat the ...

Writes a disgruntled voter - On a day when stock trading had to be suspended after it reached the upper circuit and was ballooning out of control, on a day when LTTE chief Prabhakaran, his son and aides were declared as “shot dead while trying to escape”, when TV channels ...

The peculiarity of California is that the state constitution places an extraordinary burden on voters to make legislative decisions. Some of the budget measures passed by Sacramento have to be voted on by the electorate in order for them to take full effect. On Tuesday, voters will head to the ...

Writes Geeta Padmanabhan - What does the higher voter turnout mean? A sense of despondency? Anger? (Plenty to be angry about, price-rise, power cuts, lack of a proper garbage removal system, construction of bad and unnecessary overhead roads, shrinking of walking spaces and sidewalks). They might be thinking: “If I ...

You thought you had seen them all – candidates with criminal records, bucks-and-biryani for votes, pre-and-post-poll alliances, seasoned party leapers, horse trading, disappearing legislators, MPs winning while in prison, legislators who never enter assemblies through the term of office. The 15th Lok Sabha poll, however, is now “raising the bar” ...

Writes Geeta Padmanabhan -Indian elections are a huge, enviable exercise in democracy with a mind-boggling 700 million official voters on the rolls. That should come as a lesson for a lot of countries. But it has several serious shortcomings in the very nature of its party system, its parliamentary form ...

Writes Geeta Padmanabhan -If there’s one thing that is predictable about the 15th Lok Sabha elections, it is that it is unpredictable. Even those psephologists who consider their analyses incontestable are talking in terms of “if”. The bookies are of course making a lot of hay in the unpredictable sunshine. And ...

Geeta Padmanabhan looks at some of the absurdities of the national election campaigns. Among the highlights - a "Netagiri Vidyalaya" and a bump in helicopter sales.

Writes Geeta Padmanabhan - The Third Front is a wedding menu of parties – different colours, shapes, tastes and temperaments. It is a collection mostly of parties defeated at the last Lok Sabha elections. All bound loosely by the “rice” of power. Some of these parties are familiar while others ...

Chennai-based writer Geeta Padmanabhan starts a weekly series on the upcoming general elections in India. She will take the opportunity to look at the tragedy and the comedy that is the Indian political process. In this first installment, she takes on the tremendous stimulative properties of the electoral system in ...