Opinions

The floods of Assam and Bihar have certain disconcerting elements in common. For one, they occur every year, without fail. They devastate the lives of millions of people. Every year we hear of the respective state governments taking steps to mitigate disasters. News items about the floods don’t make screaming headlines in the mainstream Indian media. But worse, the hearts of Indians don’t quite bleed anywhere else for the trauma people here are subjected to. This piece is neither a lecture in...

Last month, chemists in many states went on a day’s strike to protest against some proposed norm about the sale of antibiotics. Not many cared about it. The issue at hand, however, deserved more serious attention. It concerns the lives of one and all. The grounds for chemists to shut down shop was the government’s reported move to check over-the-counter sale of antibiotics, and to make prescriptions compulsory for selling such drugs. The government ostensibly wants to control the menace of...

A few days back, I chanced upon fast-crumbling cuttings of some of my old write-ups. None of those can be found online today since they predate the Internet era. I picked one up, and decided to key it in to upload it on to my blog since it was my first full-fledged feature on cinema. It had been written in April 1995 and was a critique of Clint Eastwood, who had at that time been awarded a Special Oscar for his contribution to Hollywood cinema. As I feverishly keyed the article in, I was...

There can be genuine problems with running an environmental campaign year after year. Since you can’t harp on the same tune all the time, there is a morbid tendency among campaigners to innovate. At times, certain innovative measures can even be bizarre, or just downright stupid. So it was with the largest British water company, Thames Water’s study that was launched during the World Water Week on August 25. The peg of the press release issued by the company was, “A third of UK women leave the...

As the holier-than-thou debate rages on in the Indian media, most of the critiques and harangues have centred around Kisan Baburao ‘Anna’ Hazare – some defending him outright, others castigating him in equal measure. Of the members of the so-called Team Anna, the one who has probably been written about the least is Kiran Bedi, the original media darling. And that she has always been, since she shot to fame for having ordered then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s vehicle to be towed away for a...

"Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they." -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau; Economie Politique (Discourse on Political Economy) Freedom means different things to different people. It varies from one individual to another, from one generation to another. Yet, it is a word that is known by all and sundry. And needless, to say, there are different kinds of freedoms. As also, the literal and the metaphorical. It...

There’s a fundamental problem with ethnic political accords — you only know in hindsight whether it worked or not. Such accords are often, though not always, a result of political expediency, especially if one of the major parties is a new incumbent. But it is always fascinating to look at one at face value when one is scripted — like the tripartite agreement signed this afternoon by the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM), the West Bengal government led by Mamata Banerjee, and the Centre. Mamata, on...

The tell-tale photographs of the street protests in Srinagar and elsewhere in Kashmir that raged during the summer of last year are difficult to forget. Pitched battles were fought between Kashmiri youths and Indian security personnel. Indian authorities came down on the protests with a heavy hand and on the protesting youths too. Much was said in the Indian media about the youth having been led astray by parochial political leaders in Kashmir, and how these were hands that had been hired for a...

It should hardly come as a surprise that the government which presided over one of the biggest mining scams to have hit this country should be averse to a UNESCO heritage tag for the state’s natural resources. The BS Yeddyurappa government in Karnataka, which sat over widespread environmental degradation in Bellary not to speak of the preceding loot, has written to the Union government refusing permission to allow UNESCO to nominate 10 forests in the Talacauvery and Kudremukh regions of the...

A sudden slap on the face is often hard to take. That’s why the death of an environmental activist on a hunger-strike protesting illegal stone quarrying and rampant mining in the state of Uttarakhand comes as a shocker. It is a rude whack on our faces because when Baba Ramdev was being force-fed to break his fast over the corruption issue in full media glare, a few hundred metres away Swami Nigamanand lay unnoticed, counting his last days. A ‘Save the Ganga’ crusader, Nigamanand had been on fast...