India should care for its elder citizens
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…
Shantanu Dutta
A Rights Based Approach to Development Work
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…
Can you train a man (or a woman) to kill in 6 months?
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…
Ukraine War: A Rock and a Hard Place
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…
Today’s Neta
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…
The Self Perpetuating Power Elite
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…
How we Treat Our Disabled : Our Not so Hidden Shame
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…
Roe vs Wade and Echoes in India
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…
Twitter: The first global Godi Media?
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…
Dog Eat Dog
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…
Should Indians Drink ?
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…
The Plight of the Indian Medical Student
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.…
Symbols not Substance
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…
The Embarrassing Discourse on Marital Rape
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…
Big Pharma and Drug Misuse
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…
When Virtual Reality is the Actual Reality
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…
Marry at 21 – An empowering step for Women?
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…
After Godi Media, now Godi NGOs
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…
Blasphemy and Sacrilege
Two recent lynchings following alleged cases of sacrilege in Punjab in…
Disempowering Beauty Pageants
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 landscape of a Cashless India
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…
Sikhs: The Generous People
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…
Climate Change and our Dilemma
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…
Drug Laws and Drug Lords
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…
The Farce of Dry days and Dry states
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 Gig Worker
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…
The Hangman’s Noose
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…
An Age of Rage
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…
Those who built my House
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…
Dark Shadows – Domestic Violence and the Middle Class
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…
Knocking at our Door – The fourth Industrial Revolution
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…
Maid in India : Reflections from a book
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.…
Refugee : The label no one wants
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…
The 8 minute Parliament
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…
Killing Ourselves
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…
Walls in the Cathedral
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…
The Disabled : The Invisible among us
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.…
Gender blindness and the Vaccine Gap
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…
Nationhood Undefined
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 “…
Lonely and Old : The challenge of India’s seniors
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…
Progressive laws in a Regressive Society
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…
Azadi : The Resurrection of a slogan
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”…
No room for Dissent
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…
Natsamrat – Shades of King Lear and other Tragedies
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…
The Tattooist of Auschwitz —– Collaboration …. Sleeping with the Enemy
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…
A History Forgotten
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…
Storytelling – A Tribute to Female Media Persons
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…
Remembering a Golden Age
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,…
A Broken System
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…
Side Effects of living – An anthology of Voices on Mental Health | Book Review
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…
Shantanu Dutta: Failure of The Rule of Law
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…
Violence and the broken Police system
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…
Growing Old
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…
Cry the Beloved Country …
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…
Donating yourself – The tortuous journey to donate your organs
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…
Witch-hunting with Impunity
“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…
Unpacking Modicare – The evolving health care paradigm
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…
Dying Well –Palliative Care in India
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…
Moving on from Primary Health Care
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.…
Is Euthanasia Legally And Morally Valid ?
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…
Annual Subscription
Join Countercurrents Annual Fund Raising Campaign and help us
