India is quite young. Its population of 1.3 billion has an average age of 29 years. Much of the country’s focus, therefore, has been on its “youth bulge” and the “demographic dividend” this should potentially yield since the working age population is greater than the segment of dependents. While the country will be able to hold on to this advantage[Read More…]
Recently someone asked me to pen down a few thoughts on why I thought that the welfarist approach to development is wrong and why I advocate a Rights-based Approach to Development. The conclusion is not totally correct as I believe there is a place for welfare-oriented activities, particularly where they would otherwise be left out completely. Or when a new[Read More…]
Can you train a man( or a woman) to kill in 6 months? Definitely yes. In fact, our crime records would indicate that a majority of killers in India; don’t require any training at all. When the time comes and the need occurs, the trigger is pulled or the dagger is thrust in, quite effortlessly. But in the armed forces,[Read More…]
One of the collateral damages of the war in Ukraine is the future of Indian medical students who went to study there. The typical profile of the students was that they appeared for the National Entrance and Eligibility Test(NEET) which regulates admission to medical colleges in India. But their scores were not high enough to get them a government medical[Read More…]
Some statements stay with you. One of them is a Tweet I read a few days ago, just after Uddhav Thackeray had resigned as Chief Minister of Maharastra. The tweet was by a Muslim who said something like this “ I am born and brought up a Muslim and have lived in Bandra. I have seen 91 and 93. I[Read More…]
The Indian Express report recently about a government-owned stadium being used by an IAS Officer to walk his dog after athletes practicing there were asked to vacate early, attracted so much public ire that the man and his wife, a fellow bureaucrat were transferred out with great rapidity. Obviously, the media coverage had a role to play in bringing to[Read More…]
In an incident that raised eyebrows recently, budget airline IndiGo denied boarding to a specially-abled child on a Hyderabad-bound flight at the Ranchi airport. The wheelchair confined boy in his teens apparently posed a safety hazard for the flight because he was in a state of panic. There were doctors on board the flight who felt otherwise and suggested that[Read More…]
I first came across the concept of abortion at the age of 17 when I watched the film “ Julie” where an Anglo Indian girl falls in love with a Hindu boy and gets pregnant with him. Abortion is briefly considered and equally quickly abandoned as it is a forbidden act for devout Christian. Eventually, Julie is sent away before[Read More…]
We all know by now, the all too familiar term Godi Media. A media which has been purchased by a particular economic or ideological entity either explicitly through a formal accusation or through other ways of inducement or coercion. Either way, the media identity; be it a print medium or a digital one ceases to report or analyse news in[Read More…]
in what can only be called a cowboy operation, less than a month ago billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd. had taken over the operations of Future Retail and offered jobs to its employees after the Kishore Biyani-led group failed to make lease payments to landlords. Reliance Retail, the retail arm of the group had in August 2020 agreed to[Read More…]
For a few weeks on February , Delhi witnessed the unusual phenomena of getting mind blowing discounts on liquor. Shops were advising buy one get one type offers , enticing people to not just buy more but drink more. The liquor business in Delhi was till recently run by the local government which ran shady looking shops colloquially called thekas.[Read More…]
Caught amid the war are thousands of Indian students, a majority of these medical students. A large number of students go to Ukraine who are in the news these days. Others go elsewhere. There are several reasons as we will see. Many, though not all degrees\ are recognised across the world, including by the World Health Organization (WHO), European Union,[Read More…]
In August 2018, India’s Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government renamed the historic Mughalsarai Junction Railway Station in the state of Uttar Pradesh after the right-wing Hindu ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, most likely because the existing name referred to the Indian Muslim Mughal dynasty. Three years earlier, in May 2015, the ruling BJP officially changed the name of the[Read More…]
It is embarrassing to any right-thinking person to read that since January 7, a two-judge bench of the Delhi High Court has been conducting daily hearings of a clutch of petitions asking for the marital rape exception under the Indian Penal Code to be struck down. India remains one of the few countries in the world that does not treat[Read More…]
I was buying some medicines at the local chemist shop a few months back. An elderly lady hobbled down the street to the shop and stood beside me. She opened her purse and took out a small piece of wrinkled paper. She stretched her equally wrinkled hand and showed the paper to the chemist. The chemist nodded and gave her[Read More…]
Some time ago, I met the daughter of a friend who has by now finished 2 years of college life without setting foot in the college campus. All this time the classes have been held online and just as she was looking forward to getting ready for offline college and making some friends, Omicron surfaced and things were back to[Read More…]
The Union cabinet recently made a decision to increase the age of marriage for girls to 21, bringing this at par with men. The age has, to put things in context, been gradually raised over the years. The legal marriage age for women in India was first set to 14 years in 1929. In 1949, the age for women was[Read More…]
As the New Year began, I woke up to the news that the FCRA of hundreds of organisations who had applied for the renewal of their permission to receive Foreign funding had been denied. In the list was the well-regarded agency Oxfam, the Missionaries of Charity founded by Mother Teresa and a chain of small rural hospitals in North and[Read More…]
Two recent lynchings following alleged cases of sacrilege in Punjab in the last month have raised disquieting questions. The first incident was reported at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, where a person accused of sacrilege was lynched to death on the[Read More…]
The 70th Miss Universe pageant was held recently in Eilat, Israel and there is a lot of celebratory chatter going on. After 21 years another Indian, Harnaaz Sandhu has won the crown. The celebration is for Chandigarh’s daughter having won the title. The last time an Indian won the said beauty pageant was 21 years ago — when Lara Dutta[Read More…]
In 2019, just a week after Cyclone Phani had hit Odisha, I had to go to Bhubaneshwar on work. Most of the usual hotels I stay in were not accepting bookings, they had still not been able to restore services to normalcy and were therefore not accepting customers. With some difficulty, I got a booking in an obscure hotel where[Read More…]
Tensions have been rising in Gurugram, just outside of Delhi for some weeks on the matter of Muslims offering Namaz in the open in public spaces, sometimes blocking traffic. On the face of it, the whole business of offering prayers on the streets appears to be a needless provocation until it comes to light that there are just not enough[Read More…]
On the sidelines of the climate change COP 26 meetings, a lot of background information came out in the limelight. The information is not new, would have been known to those working in the field for a long time but hasn’t received the attention it should. It is no doubt true that the Climate Change agenda is being driven by[Read More…]
The consumption and possession of narcotic drugs has been under public lens in India in the wake of high-profile arrests in recent times. It has once again brought into the limelight an issue often buried 6 feet under. Measures to legalise drugs that have been traditionally consumed in India for centuries , sometimes and are largely acceptable in moderation have[Read More…]
At a conference I attended some time ago, during cocktails, I observed a few delegates from Gujarat sipping their drinks from steel glasses. When I asked them out of curiosity the reason, one of them cryptically replied that if one lived in Gujarat, one too learned to do things this way. What they were trying to say was that when[Read More…]
I usually use Uber Bikes, a bike-hailing service from Uber to get around short distances in my colony area… may be a maximum of 5 kilometers or so. Apart from Uber, I am aware of at least two other apps that provide such services Ola and Rapido, and have these on my phone too. If Uber isn’t available or the[Read More…]
Does the death penalty work ? Or is it an anachronism which is long past its “use by” date ? But still continues to remain in use ? According to Amnesty International, there are 106 countries where use of the death penalty is not allowed by law and 8 countries which permit the death penalty only for serious crimes in[Read More…]
A few days ago , a few guys were travelling in an electric rickshaw at about 11 pm in the night. The driver , possibly to break the monotony of the hour had some loud music playing on his FM Radio. One of the passengers asked for the music to be turned off or at least toned down. The driver[Read More…]
In the film, Dafan found on YouTube, a young civil engineer is giving a tour of a construction site to his manager and boss. When a worker at the site has an accident and sustains serious injuries, he is rushed to hospital. But despite the best efforts of the doctors, he dies. At this stage, the manager leaves after giving[Read More…]
A young woman comes to office wearing dark goggles. As her colleagues direct enquiring glances towards her, she says that of late she hasn’t had much sleep and has developed dark circles under her eyes. But her colleagues seem to think they are bruises. In the evening , in the lift of her housing society, a particularly intrusive neighbour looks[Read More…]
A lot of my work in recent years has been to work for the eradication of Forced Labour in India. The approach favoured in my set up ( and in many others) is what has come to be termed as a “ Raid and Rescue” approach. An establishment where Forced Labour is identified, a rescue team comprising or at least[Read More…]
Tripta Lahiri’s book “ Maid in India” on what it means to be a domestic help in an average middle or upper class Indian households is a surprisingly accurate one. It does not paint a binary black and white picture – maids good and noble and employers all evil and cruel. It presents a balanced picture of the benevolent and[Read More…]
Most people in the world have had the experience of leaving the place where they were born and grew up. Usually they will only move as far as the next big city or to a neighbouring state But for some people, they will need to leave their country entirely – sometimes for a short time, but sometimes forever. There are[Read More…]
The monsoon session has seen 20 bills passed in both Houses of Parliament, either without discussion or minimal, limited to treasury bench MPs speaking on the legislation. The Rajya Sabha has passed nine bills since the House convened on July 19 and clocked nearly 17 minutes per bill for discussion and passing, as the Centre decided to push the legislative[Read More…]
Recently I watched a film with the title “ Project Marathwada”. The story is about an old farmer from Nandurbar , a small town in Maharashtra. He wants to meet the Chief Minister. His son has recently committed suicide due to mounting debt and so have so many other farmers in the area. He is unable to meet the Chief[Read More…]
As I write this piece ,what lingers in my mind is the picture of the Indian women’s hockey team entering the women’s hockey semi finals for the first time in history even though they eventually lost there. It is interesting turn of events in a country where women are generally denied as many opportunities as men that so many women[Read More…]
A few days ago, I happened to visit an ATM to withdraw some cash. The ATM was located in a busy marketplace and in a narrow space between two shops. The machine had to be reached by climbing a short flight of steps. At the glass fronted entrance there was a notice which referred to a Reserve Bank circular advising[Read More…]
In a patriarchal society male privilege is not far away. So it should be no surprise that it has entered the domain of Covid vaccinations in India , especially at a time of vaccine shortage. Since the beginning of the vaccination drive, 14.99 crore doses have been administered to women while 17.8 crore doses have been given to men, government[Read More…]
Someone I know serves as a high ranking officer of the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) that India maintains under the aegis of the Ministry of Home Affairs(MHA) to “ manage: its own people. The British had just two such force to control and subjugate its colonial subjects but free India has found it necessary to maintain seven of them[Read More…]
Recently I had the opportunity to watch the Hindi film adaptation of Jaywant Dalvi’s famous Marathi play “ Sandhya Chhaya”. Set in the Mumbai (then Bombay) of the 1970s, it deals with the challenges of empty nesters. The play has just two characters – an elderly couple ( endearingly called “nana” and “nani”) who live in a large but empty[Read More…]
The Hansal Mehta directed biopic “ Aligarh” is possibly the most stark of the recent films made that shows homophobia at its most brutal. The imagery of Manoj Bajpayee as the lonely and socially isolated Professor Siras, finding solace behind closed doors in endless pegs of whisky and melancholic Lata Mangeshkar songs will not easily leave you. Professor Siras has[Read More…]
In August we celebrate the 74th anniversary of our independence. At the time, the communists had raised the slogan then famous or rather infamous – “ yeh azadi jhoohi hai” .. this is a false independence meaning that this independence would not mean anything the ordinary people fighting for daily survival and that this was a festival of the elite.[Read More…]
In the post world war era, when the first wave of decolonisation happened and many countries were given their independence, India was the most prominent of those let go. Most prominent in the sense that India was considered the crown jewel of the British empire and the British King was separately designated too as the emperor of India. India’s independence [Read More…]
Natsamrat (The King of the theatre) has shades of King Lear in it. However, the masterpiece of this Marathi movie starring Nana Patekar as Ganapat Rao Belwalkar is not just Nana, though his performance is spectacular. It is his best friend in the movie, Vikram Gokhale as Rambhau who lingers. Both are actors on the stage and according to[Read More…]
After reading this book “ The Tattooist of Auschwitz”, the first thought that came into my mind was that this novel based on the life of one man and his wife among others could be the fiction companion of Victor Frankl’s immortal work “ Man’s search for Meaning” written in similar circumstances in a concentration camp. But on deeper reflection,[Read More…]
During a visit to Amritsar some years ago, en route to the Golden Temple, I visited another neighboring Gurudwara – Gurudwara Saragarhi Sahib. The guide accompanying us narrated a bit of the history of the Gurudwara and its significance but the narrative meant nothing to me. Although I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about history, at least compared to most, all[Read More…]
Prima facie, this piece is a reflection on the book – “Making News, Breaking News – Her way” edited by Latika Padgaonkar and Shubha Singh which chronicles the narratives of women media persons who have won the prestigious Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Women Media persons. In reality though, this is a tribute to journalists, particularly women journalists who[Read More…]
Very rarely one has the privilege and opportunity to see and observe a golden age. Mostly one reads about past golden ages in the history books…. The era of Ashoka, Akbar, etc … All in the past… in modern times, the era of Nehru…. There I have displayed by ideological biases, but I was around in the last years of[Read More…]
I never thought that the face of a broken justice system would be made visible to the nation through a bunch of doctors. As I write, a junior doctor’s strike which initially began in West Bengal, but gradually garnering support enters its second week. Instigated by the assault of two junior doctors by a mob that assembled after a patient[Read More…]
As a doctor because of it, I understood and looked upon mental health issues purely from a clinically detached fashion. I understood the basic facts, that India had one of the largest number of people suffering from depression and is in fact according to India today, the most depressed country in the world today according to a recent India Today[Read More…]
Violence manifests all around us every day, sometimes subtly and sometimes pervasively, but we often miss it. Except for the occasional headlines in the paper, mentioning road rage incidents where two drivers were caught in a brawl or an odd story about domestic violence which managed to escape the deep shutters of society and made it to the court or[Read More…]
Everyday violence is all around us – all pervasive and yet invisible. Invisible because we live in a society where low-level endemic day to day violence is normalized that we have developed blind spots that stop us from seeing what is sometimes right below our noses – sometimes, often in our own homes. To highlight this, an organization recently held[Read More…]
For decades, I am observing my mother growing old. 3 memories, 3 falls stay in my mind. The first fall was on the streets of Kolkata and that made her housebound after she fractured her hip and had to have surgery. Fortunately, it was a big house in Kolkata and there was plenty of space to move around but gone[Read More…]
Many years ago, I read a moving book appropriately titled “ Cry the beloved Country”. Written by Alan Paton, well-known author of the time, It was set in apartheid-era South Africa. But it could well have been set in India. Every time, I open my newspaper, I read the story of someone or the other who has been denied justice[Read More…]
The Finance minister , Shri Arun Jaitley underwent a kidney transplant operation successfully recently, following in the footsteps of Mrs. Sushma Swaraj, the External Affairs Minister in 2016. Even as he recovers from the surgery, the transplant has brought into focus, the lives of lakhs of people living in the shadows – those who are waiting, often for years for[Read More…]
“Witch-hunting is a modern phenomenon with ancient roots. We are perhaps familiar of people being branded as witches in medieval times when certain people were labelled as ‘witches’ and executed across Europe, Africa and Asia. The victims included Joan of Arc, who was burnt alive at the stake, at the age of 19 for heresy, on 30 May 1431.” But[Read More…]
The recently launched Ayushman Bharat, also known as the National Health Protection Scheme (or even Modicare in popular parlance!) has two objectives — first, creating a network of health and wellness centers to bring all-inclusive primary healthcare close to the community, and secondly, providing insurance cover to 40 per cent of India’s population, that is most deprived, for secondary and[Read More…]
On 10th May, the high-profile police officer from Mumbai, Himanshu Roy committed suicide by shooting himself with his service revolver. In a suicide note recovered later, Roy is reported to have said that he is taking this extreme step out of extreme depression due to an incurable cancer. Mr. Roy had been living with cancer since 2000 with[Read More…]
Primary health care is an important strategy which is the backbone of health service delivery. Primary health care is the day-to-day care needed to protect, maintain, or restore our health. For those who use it, it is both their first point of contact with the government healthcare system and their most frequently used health service. In last 6 decades of[Read More…]
Is euthanasia legally and morally valid ? This question has been asked in India in different situations. In India, the status of euthanasia is no different. It was the Aruna Ramachandra Shanbaug case that got significant public attention and led the Supreme Court of India to initiate detailed deliberations on the long ignored issue of euthanasia The Constitution of India[Read More…]
Today, as I write this, the country is outraged at rapes seemingly happening around the country and causing outrage- in Kathua, Unnao, Surat and now Etah. Nothing has much changed since December 2012 when the rape and murder of a 21-year-old college student on a bus in New Delhi shook the conscience of the entire nation. The incident led to[Read More…]
One of the few good things that emerged out of the Emergency imposed by Mrs. Indira Gandhi in 1975 was the Bonded Labour System(Abolition) Act of 1976 which replaced an ordinance of the same name which was enacted in 1975. In fact, eradication of bonded labour was one of the famous 20-point programme that Mrs. Gandhi implemented and monitored during[Read More…]
Biden & Blinken “The Dr Strange Love Duo” of WWIII’s Nuclear Winter 
On Understanding Generative AI as a Corporate-Fascist Weapon 
U.S. Tells Another Bedtime Story to Scare Away Normal Relations With China and Cuba 
Where Are the World’s Water Stresses? 
Why American Voters Should At Least Listen to What Robert Kennedy Jr. Has to Say 
It’s Always About Protecting Our Children 
BJP’s Communal Politics Has Deepened Historical Conflicts in Manipur 
Letter to Bishops of India from Fr Cedric Prakash 
Deadly wildfire smoke spreads across much of northeast US 
Book Review: The Story of a People’s Movement 
Recession In Eurozone While UK Faces Highest Inflation In Developed World 
Patriotic Criminals and Anti-National Criminals 
Remembering NTR the politician in his centenary Year 
The US Shouldn’t Stand in the Way of an Ambitious Global Plastics Treaty 
France’s Global Warming Predicament 
The Spark 
Vanishing of Many Stretches of Aravalli Hills Will Prove Very Costly 
The End of Title 42 and the Triumph of the Border-Industrial Complex 
A New Direction for the World Bank? 
Conspiracy! Whose Conspiracy? 
Wrestlers’ struggle for justice : Will it endure? 
‘Digital India Bill’: Some things to worry about 
Electricity wasted in Mumbai as energy supply is cut off for hours in towns 
Samalkha Nestle Workers Union stage protest against preventing formation of Union 
Odisha rail accident- BSNL’s commendable performance- Should India diminish its public sector, allow private oligarchs to profiteer? 
Wildfire Smoke Chokes Canada and Eastern US 
Terracidal But Ignored Carbon Debt From Gas Exploitation By The World & Climate Criminal Australia 
China and Palestine: No To ‘Piecemeal Crisis Management’ 
Can China and the United States Establish Mutual Respect to Lessen Tensions? 
How Empire Fabricates Atrocities 
For Balanced Progress, Indian Railways Must Get Their Priorities Right 
Determining Scheduled Area: An Update 
The new Parliament house may be dangerously undemocratic 
Ranajit Guha: A duality of literature and history 
DIPAM’s hasty moves to disinvest the government’s residual share in HZL highly imprudent and against the public interest 
A Climate of Betrayal 
Deserving Each Other: The PGA Tour-LIV Golf Merger 
The World Economy Is Changing—the People Know, but Their Leaders Don’t 
Tribute to Chris Hani on 30th martyrdom Anniversary 
Proper Treatment of Rail Accident Victims Demands Long-term Commitment and Support 
Our beloved K.P.Sasi is no more. Filmmaker, cartoonist, writer, mentor, friend and above all tireless activist championing the cause of every underdog, Sasi breathed his last, mid-afternoon this Christmas day – after battling a medical condition for months. I remember the last time I met him, almost exactly a month before he passed away, at the ayurvedic healing center in[Read More…]
