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‘Raj Nivas should have ignored ‘Union’ versus ‘Centre’ debate’
The Hindu
‘Clarification from L-G’s office only served to confound matters’
Former Member of Parliament M. Ramadass has said that the office of the Lt. Governor should have desisted from wading into the "unfounded, mischievous and trivial" controversy over the term Ondriya Arasu (Union Government) and said that the subsequent clarification from Raj Nivas only served to confound matters. The term had recently kicked-off a debate over the connotation of the usage from the perspective of Centre-State relations and the principles of federalism after the BJP in Tamil Nadu found Chief Minister M.K. Stalin's preferred reference to the Centre as Ondriya Arasu and not Madhiya Arasu (Central government), objectionable and politically loaded. The use of the term ‘Union’ by Lt. Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan while administering the oath of office and secrecy to the Council of Ministers of the NDA government on June 27 set off another round of heated chatter on social media.![](/newspic/picid-1269750-20250217064624.jpg)
When fed into Latin, pusilla comes out denoting “very small”. The Baillon’s crake can be missed in the field, when it is at a distance, as the magnification of the human eye is woefully short of what it takes to pick up this tiny creature. The other factor is the Baillon’s crake’s predisposition to present less of itself: it moves about furtively and slides into the reeds at the slightest suspicion of being noticed. But if you are keen on observing the Baillon’s crake or the ruddy breasted crake in the field, in Chennai, this would be the best time to put in efforts towards that end. These birds live amidst reeds, the bulrushes, which are likely to lose their density now as they would shrivel and go brown, leaving wide gaps, thereby reducing the cover for these tiddly birds to stay inscrutable.