Letters to the editor

Letter of the Week AwardThe ‘newspaper-active reader relationship’ is of enormous significance for a serious publication. A good l...

Letter of the Week Award

The ‘newspaper-active reader relationship’ is of enormous significance for a serious publication. A good letter, especially a good letter that critiques us, is of immense value. It is to recognise this and to encourage quality reader intervention that The Indian Express is instituting the Letter of the Week Award. Beginning with the issue dated March 31, we will announce and publish every Saturday the reader intervention our editors deem the best. Selection will be from letters received that week. Letters should be e-mailed

to letters.editpageexpressindia.com or sent to The Indian Express, 9&10, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, New Delhi -110002.

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Letter writers will have to give their postal address with every contribution.

The winner receives books worth Rs 1,000 and his letter gets pride of the place in the letters column as well as on our website.

Billionaire’s travails

• THIS refers to ‘Don’t look out for the billionaires’ by Sudheendra Kulkarni (The Sunday Express, March 25). I wish from the bottom of my heart every human would be rich and nobody would have to work for anybody. But sadly that remains a utopia. Kulkarni would like all the employees to receive the lion’s share of the assets disproportionately in comparison to what the promoters get. It is easy for an armchair analysts like Kulkarni to wish that. Has he ever tried to start a business? Has he ever wondered what a man goes through to get his business established? If the employees want to have more of the assets they can start their own businesses; more power to them. For every successful business there are about 99 that fail. The entrepreneur who starts a business that fails goes broke. Is there a heart bleeding for him? When I started my business, I worked all day and night. Every two weeks I would sell my blood to make extra money to survive. When I succeeded, people were jealous of my wealth. Nobody cared to know what I had to do to get that wealth. May there be no poor man in the world; but the stark reality is there will always be poor people because there will always be those who are not willing to take any chances in their lives.

— Ashok R. Tolat, Ahmedabad

Left intellect

• LEFT intellectuals get furious when people get killed in states ruled by non-Left parties, but when the same thing happens in Left-ruled states they express only resentment in measured words (‘On their Marx, ready to bow’, IE, March 27). The response of the Left intellectuals to police and cadre brutality in Singur and Nandigram showed them in their true colours. These intellectuals have rationalised the double standards of their comrades on many occasions. Time to carefully examine what lies under the veneer of sophisticated left intellectualism.

— Bibhu Prasad Nayak, New Delhi

Scrap the corrupt

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• THE textbook scam in MP is a disgraceful episode (‘Shiksha for Sarkar’, IE, March 27). I am reminded of a story. A king had been receiving many complaints of corruption against one of his servants. Fed up, he ordered the culprit to count the waves of the sea. The man was not short of ideas, and on the excuse of counting the waves, he kept detaining many ships. He was willing, however, to relax if he was gratified.The MP government should dismiss those involved. It should make an exampleof them.

— M.K.D. Prasada Rao, Ghaziabad