SMOKE SCREEN: Manipur Secretariat in flames

Imphal/Shillong: Far from the front pages of Delhi lay two of India's most exciting polities. In Manipur, 12 Congress MLAs defected to the Samata Party in February, taking it from one-MLA status to ruling group in a crazily confusing coalition. New Chief Minister Radhabinod Koijam found himself unseated four months later, when the very bunch of MLAs defected to his BJP allies. Next the idea of a cease-fire with extremists in Nagaland-they claim parts of Manipur for their state-led to mob violence and the Assembly in Imphal being torched. Two MLAs were injured; the rest fled to Delhi. They're still talking of "popular government".

Unlike Manipur, Meghalaya is not under President's rule yet. Its Assembly too was burnt down, though. What's more, it saw the usual round of musical chairs-Chief Minister E.K. Mawlong of the United Democratic Party took on former Lok Sabha Speaker P.A. Sangma for the affection of the latter's Nationalist Congress Party MLAs. Mawlong was overthrown. Sangma protege Flinder Anderson Khonglam now heads a 37-member ministry in a 60-member House. Wow.

Ranil, Chandrika must work it out

Colombo: Sri Lankans tired of the never-ending civil war against the separatist ltte voted the United National Party's suave Ranil Wickremesinghe to power in parliamentary elections on December 6. The outcome promises many hiccups since President Chandrika Kumaratunga is the new prime minister's arch rival. To end conflict, people are even willing to give cohabitation a try.

Yerwadi: In a year that saw India's umpteenth adoption scandal, human tragedies were a dime a dozen. Yet few events in 2001 were as moving as the fire in a privately-run mental asylum in this Tamil Nadu town. It killed 28 inmates. Battered by fate anyway, these patients had been chained by the asylum's supervisors so as to prevent them from "disorderly conduct". Eventually, the shackles ensured the hapless inmates could not escape the flames.

The incident made news overseas, made India look terrible. It also exposed the plight of the mentally ill in India. In a country where an estimated 20 million need psychiatric help, there are 30,000 hospital beds and 4,000 psychiatrists. Buried somewhere in these cold statistics are the embers of a tragedy.

THE REST OF THE NEWS

THE GOLDEN PUMPKINS Yashwant Sinha: The finance minister who insisted the economy was fine. Said he didn't know about the UTI crisis. Arundhati Roy: Our homegrown Rosa Luxemburg. Show her the Cause and she'll show you the Essay. Abhishek Bachchan: AB Negative. The star son whose only idea of a hit was beating up journalists. Sourav Ganguly: If he batted half as well as he sneered, he'd be bloomin' Bradman. Jyoti Basu: Said to have retired, he re-emerged as prime minister in waiting. May he keep waiting. Subhash Ghai: Remember a magnum lemon called Yaadein? K.Sudarshan: The RSS chief was finally shooed away from Delhi, told to keep away from the media.

The Base in India

Delhi: It should have served as an early warning though the plan was not quite as elaborate as flying aeroplanes into corporate totem poles. A car was to drive up to the visa section of the US Embassy in Delhi on August 15, 2001 and stall.

NICK OF TIME: The villains in custody

It would be left on the roads, an incendiary on wheels that would bring the pink and cream building down. But a month before this could happen, Sudanese student Abdel Raouf Hawash and Patna cleric Shamim Sarwar were apprehended. On interrogation the duo confessed to having put into operation Osama bin Laden's evil designs against the US. Hawash believed in jehad while Sarwar pleaded that money had warped his mind. If not for the Delhi Police, newspapers would have had 15/8 to juxtapose with 9/11 and 13/12. The presence of the Al Qaida-the Base, in Arabic-in India was to be confirmed in December by the arrest and questioning of Mohammad Afroz, who admitted to the Mumbai Police to being a suicide pilot for bin Laden's group.

Of Mice and Men

Delhi: This was a historic year for ties between mice and humans. When the human genome was decoded in February and we were told to our chagrin that all of us (and not just some people) have about the same number of genes as mice-30,000-that was humbling enough. Worse was to follow. Sometime in November scientists also implanted human brain cells in mice.

Horrific visions of clever mice running around reading this article are still a little far-fetched, though: that was merely as part of stem cell research, and while stem cells can grow into pretty much anything, they take on the characteristic of the tissue they are put into. That's actually what all the scientists are excited about because it means we're looking at a future where you can take these cells and grow them into a kidney or a bone or, if needed, a brain. The decoding of the human genome holds forth promise of another sort: designer drugs, tailored to each of us and our idiosyncratic bodies. So people who can't stomach the one-type-kills-all germ bashers of today could fall ill with fewer fears.

MEET THE MISSUS: The Akshay Kumars

Mumbai: After breaking up with Pooja Batra, Raveena Tandon and Shilpa Shetty, Rajiv Bhatia, aka Akshay Kumar, finally said "Yes". He succumbed to the idea of happy matrimony with comely Twinkle Khanna. Akshay, for whom the wedding meant the privilege of calling Dimple Kapadia "Mommy", wasn't the only bachelor to retire. Ajay Jadeja fixed the match of his life by getting Jaya Jaitly's daughter Aditi to agree. Jaddu is now acting in the movies. Will Akshay start playing cricket now?

Slow Burning Issue

STAYING ALIVE: Children play with the remains of a shell

Pathankot: Spontaneous combustion is not a happy phenomenon for a location that houses a few hundred tonnes of explosives, but the Indian Army's ammunition dumps have fallen into a disconcerting pattern of just lighting up. In one particularly inflammable four weeks, three of them caught fire between April 29 and June 3, 2001. In Pathankot, 427 tonnes of shells worth Rs 20 crore blew up. A month later it was Birdhwal in Rajasthan. Then on June 3 the dump at Rohtak in Haryana caught fire. Neglected storage facilities is the most obvious cause. Sixty per cent of the army's ammunition is stored in the open, and even simple precautions like not letting the grass grow around the perimeter are often forgotten. A CAG report has described the ammunition supply chain as being of "Second World War" vintage.

BIG FISHY: Subramanyam

The year 2001 did not break free from the notorious legacy of the 1990s on scams. Though the Tehelka expose had shaken stock markets in March, the real knocker for small investors came in July. The then UTI chairman P.S. Subramanyam suspended trading in the country's biggest and oldest mutual fund scheme, US-64. The suspension was revoked within a week, Subramanyam was sacked within a month and in five months since July, two reports on UTI's restructuring have been readied. How effective all this has been in stemming the rot will be known on January 1, 2002 when US-64 will be traded on the stock markets for the first time. That day, two crore investors in US-64 will discover its true price. And UTI will discover the true loyalty of its investors.