First Person

[This is an excerpt from the thesis submitted by Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976) to the Communist Party of India in 1954. The thesis remained buried for many years, and was accidentally discovered among old files in the Party office in 1993. This is the preamble to the thesis.] We are witnessing a curious phenomenon today. We are witnessing an unprecedented expansion of progressive influence in the cultural sphere. Through their art, many common artists, from professional and other fields, are...

The Supreme Court, in 2006, had passed a landmark judgment directing all state governments and the Union government to reform the way police forces function all over the country. One of the directives was that police complaints authorities (PCAs) should be set up in all states. The intention was to make the police accountable for their actions. The court directed the setting up of both state level and district level police complaints authorities so that they would be easily accessible for all...

It happens with all journalists. You work on a story, watch it slowly build up, wait for an opportune moment, and finally the story never sees the light of day, for whatever reason. I have never cursed myself for stories that have ended up dead, for that was always a frustrating part of the game; but this time I will never be able to excuse myself. For I had wanted to write on the work of a young woman who now lies dead, brutally shot dead this morning. Shehla Masood, 38, had been fighting for...

The Playing for Change movement has launched a new video, global rendition of the classic Rolling Stones track, “Gimme Shelter.” Playing for Change is a multimedia music project created by the American producer and sound engineer Mark Johnson with his Timeless Media Group, that seeks to bring together musicians from around the world. Playing For Change also created a non-profit organisation called the Playing For Change Foundation which builds music schools for children around the world. The...

For the first time, a seminal scripture of Ayurveda – the most ancient and important system of medicine in India – is being textually analysed and historically explored piece by piece through the existing manuscripts. The project aims to reconstruct a more authentic version of this treatise and its content. Methods from evolutionary biology are also being used in order to assess the originality of the different versions of the text, which was written in Sanskrit. Preserving health and curing...

I was a tad surprised when he told me that he wouldn’t be able to meet me late evening since it was late, and he would have to return home. You don’t always expect guys to rush homewards just because it is a trifle late. We had initially planned to meet early evening, but another appointment had held me up. So we caught up on phone, and fixed 8:30 the morrow morn for a tête-à-tête. Since you don’t expect things to move at the same pace in Kashmir as it does in Delhi, I took it easy. I was late...

I was idling away a lazy winter afternoon at office, most probably nine years ago, when I got a frantic call from a friend. Her youngest sister’s husband had been diagnosed with dengue. There was reason to be worried. They needed blood, latest by nightfall. There was only this one sureshot place in Delhi where you could get the blood you wanted, even if it wasn’t available elsewhere in town. We had to act, fast. I rushed out of my Kasturba Gandhi Road office and picked up my friend. We made for...

If it is the Indian mainstream media which has been keeping you informed about Kashmir, trust me, you have been in the wrong hands. Lies are peddled by the government, and in turn faithfully disseminated by the Indian media. This is a brief attempt at dispelling those lies-turned-myths. Kashmir is militant-infested Who told you so? Watching too many Bollywood films, or what? If the official admission is anything to go by, there are not more than 500 militants operating today in Kashmir. And all...

Verses. Poems. Limericks. Whatever they were, I never liked reading them, studying them at school. But sometime in the 1980s I had this friend called Amit. He wrote his self-indulgent poems and implored me to write too; the contagious habit rubbed on to me for a while. Those were frivolous, pretentious verses. Streams of the subconsciousness. Words flowed as they came out, we did not damn them. They created, ostentatiously, meanings as they crystallised on paper. The papers made their way to the...

Mobile number portability is finally a reality. It may well be a choice between the devil and the deep sea, for all you know. What is Mobile Number Portability: It is a new development in mobile communications technology. In India there are more than 700 million mobile users. In this service the mobile user can switch to other service provider without changing the mobile numbers. Both prepaid and postpaid tele-users have the facility to switch to other favourable tele-operators. How to switch...