Kerala Rail Development Corporation Limited ( K-Rail ) is a Joint Venture Company under the Government of Kerala and Ministry of Railways, Government of India. SilverLine is their “ Thiruvananthapuram – Kasaragod Semi High-Speed Rail Project ”. The 529.45 km SilverLine corridor connecting Kasaragod and Thiruvananthapuram, with an operating speed of 200kmph, eases the transport between North and South ends of the state and reduces the total travel time to less than 4 hours, compared with the present 10 to 12 hours. The intermediate stations include Kollam, Chengannur, Kottayam, Ernakulam, Kochi Airport, Thrissur, Tirur, Kozhikode and Kannur. Most of you would be knowing all this and more as it is a hot discussion across Kerala. Some are for development and others are against development. Everyone has a point to make and so do I! Having decided to give part of the land for infrastructure development, what would a common man prefer on his land - a road or a railway line? A road means bett...

That’s my 4-year-old daughter asking me one morning. It was not a silly question. It provoked me to think deep. I was sweeping my front yard that day. It is usually my wife or mother who does this, while I would be reading the newspaper. It is not that I don’t know sweeping. I just choose not to do it. If I remember right, the last time I swept the front yard was when I was a kid playfully helping my grandmother. It was her daily routine then. My mother started doing and now my wife does it. My wife fell sick and I was forced to share the workload of my ageing mother. There I started sweeping and the little one got up in the morning seeing me on the job instead of her grandma or mother. “Are you a girl?”, she asked and started smiling. I have not seen my father or grandfather sweeping the front yard. I think I know only one person who has been sweeping for years, not letting her wife do it. Who should sweep, that is not the subject here. We should know that we all have grown up with su...