Tarique A Bhat
Our apex healthcare Institute has performed more than 10,000 major surgeries in 2008,

Sajjad Lone may have considered the option of losing elections, but was unprepared for losing his face with his security deposit. Haroon Mirani looks at the ramifications of Lone’s loss on him and on the separatist camp.
A week after the results of parliament elections 2009 were out, separatist turned unionist, Sajjad Lone appears unable to come out of the shock - of his defeat. The media savvy politician with a flair for television chat shows is skipping media since.
Accused of fielding proxies in previous elections, some of whom won with his backing, Sajjad had to hide his face after losing his security deposit.
Last month when the reluctant separatist announced his foray into electoral politics, a confident Lone then had remarked that his defeat would be “only his own”.  He had justified what he called his “change of strategy” by the huge turnout of people in 2008 assembly elections.

By the time you read this editorial comment, the results of the election to the Indian

Arshad Malik
India is hot these days, with mercury jumping degrees with every passing day and the heat of the ongoing elections further firing up the emotional thermodynamics of the nation. In India, like elsewhere in democracies, “election” or the exercise of the right to vote is the highest and most extensive form of civilizational discourse that majorly alters the contours of the nation society. But over the decades, long since India gained independence from the British, elections in this country have attained the character of a gambit, where the initiative of the common man – the citizenry – to exercise the ballot power least attributes to the whole process of electing the so-called “representatives of the masses”. Nowadays, it is more about personal vendettas of political parties who have locked horns over power and less about the pure practice of electing a representative government to power.