Critique of the Times

The polls are here – now is the time to fabricate politically correct statements. So the BJP prime minister-in-waiting Atal Bihari Vajpayee pledges to hasten in the Women’s Reservation Bill and goes on to add, “Rapists should be hanged.” Don’t ask why this man never came out with such radical assertions all these years. For pretty much the same reason, PR Kumarmangalam, when cornered on a TV show about his party creating an issue of Sonia Gandhi’s Italian roots, comes out with a patriarchal...

Two drunk schmucks get horny in a bar, and try to fiddle around with a woman. (Commonplace behaviour, we might say, in a bar at least.) When they are asked to behave themselves, they turn violent. (Just as commonplace, we might agree too.) They are, thankfully, apprehended and detained at a nearby police station. And after a while, all hell breaks loose. For, a gang of their armed, pillaging, comrades land up at the police station and thrash the policemen black and blue. The script might sound...

Sooner or later, it had to happen. Forty-two children from the isolated Jarawa tribe of the Andaman Islands have been hit by measles in the last three weeks in an epidemic which could wipe them out if not nipped now. The figure represents 16 per cent of the tribe's total population of 270. Liberal estimates put the population count at 300. The Jarawa people of the Andaman Islands lived until very recently in almost complete isolation. Both British and Indian settlers have moved onto their...

We have a new national pastime these days – humiliating our heroes, degrading the very people who have done our nation proud. If the jeering of Sachin Tendulkar by the lumpen scoundrels of Mumbai masquerading as cricket fans wasn't enough, the takeover mafia of Gujarat has done a moo de grace by hounding out Verghese Kurien. It is all fine, some might say. The old order must certainly changeth. And it must just as certainly yield place to the new. You cannot fault the contention – it is the law...

Man, if you are stressed out, you can easily go and rape and practically get away with it these days. No, not by hoodwinking the law, or by finding ways to cirumvent the system. In fact, the law will be on your side and be pretty sympathetic too. A US soldier who raped a Nigerian woman in Italy has been given a lighter sentence because the court deemed his tour of duty in Iraq had made him less sensitive to the suffering of others. James Michael Brown beat and handcuffed the woman, a Nigerian...

The Best Bakery and Jessica Lall court rulings are now being seen in conjunction. It is natural that they would be. Not only did one judgment follow close on the heels of the other, they also provided an interesting study of contrasts. That of the consectaneous deduction that witnesses will gush forth with the truth in a conducive environment. [Henceforth, BB – Best bakery, and JL – Jessica Lall, for the sake of convenience] The court ruling in the JL case left everyone despondent. Disenchanted...

A disaster becomes a farce when the underlying tragedy gets buried, for whatever be the reason. That is just what has happened with the Supreme Court order paving the way for more malls and luxury apartments in the congested metropolis of Mumbai that should translate into billions of rupees for mill owners. It is not just the court ruling which will be environmentally calamitous for Mumbai. The real tragedy lies in the fact that all voices of reason have been drowned in the Babel of eulogies...

For a book priced at an astronomical Rs 1 lakh (that would be $2,250 or thereabouts), it ought to be your unfettered right to know what on earth lies between the blazing covers. But Ritu Beri isn't telling you. You need to buy the book to find out as much, that has been her repartee all this while. What the blazes! Anyway, don't you tax your brain too much about the issue, having read those eulogising agency news items; this blog will actually vindicate your ill-founded fears. The book is not...

My colleagues were exhilarated. They were agitated too. So the woman who, they claimed, had killed hundreds and got away with it, had finally been gunned down. Quite rightly so, they belligerently maintained. Those who live by the sword must die by the sword, was the apology. But they were disturbed as well. What if the man, who had liquidated her and been subsequently nabbed, were to be hanged for the justice he had meted out? It would become a travesty of justice. The boss, barely able to gulp...