[Avadhoot Bhagwan Ram Kustha Sewa Ashram reportedly treating the highest number of leprosy patients in the world] Avadhoot Bhagwan Ram Kustha Sewa Ashram reportedly treating the highest number of leprosy patients in the world A few years ago I had visited Amravati near Nagpur. An NRI I knew had for some years funded […]
“You’re entitled to your own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts.” Attributed to US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Gen. V K Singh’s appellation of “presstitutes” in a Tweet caused a storm of responses in the media. If simple remark that media finds Yemen less exciting than my attending PAK day is contorted […]
The attacks in Paris on Charlie Hebdo bring to a fore fault lines in Europe. It has fuelled a European right that is calling for bans on Muslim immigrants. A major French TV anchor called for deportation of their existing Muslim population. For a while the hashtag #KillAllMuslims trended on Twitter. Germany saw anti-Muslim protests […]
[Plight of Indian women is a marketing tool for the Global evangelical movement.] Rape is a terrible crime, a case where the victims are overwhelmingly women and the perpetrators overwhelmingly men. Every rape carries with it a personal story of trauma. To use statistics to speak about rape appears to dehumanize it into a number. […]
[India needs a decentralised education model that does not impose city standards on schools in villages and tribal areas.] “India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, and so is Burma, because the British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, […]
[With all of Narendra Modi’s good intentions, broom-wielding politicians are not going to create a swachh bharat. Instead, we need massive investment in solid and liquid waste management in India.] For the success of Prime Minister Modi’s Swachh Bharat campaign it is important to focus on the issue of civic infrastructure for waste management rather […]
India needs freedom from communalism of minority-majority politics. It may be the law of unintended consequences or it may simply be the result of the climate of partition in which our Constitution was framed. Whatever the reason, the Indian Constitution has significant communal clauses that result in separatism and religious identity politics. Constitutional reform is […]
[New Delhi: Left leaders protest against Israel’s attack on Gaza at Parliament House in New Delhi on July 18. PTI Photo by Atul Yadav] Palestine is a pivotal cause for the Global left ummah. This support is a puzzle. It is certainly not the pre-eminent human rights crisis in our neighborhood or even in […]
[The way forward is not about going back to some hypothetical golden age or denying that we have real problems to solve today. But our problems appear unsolvable because we have failed to understand ourselves in our own language, on our own terms.] Some years ago I was out on a date with an American […]
I recently read a news report which said that planning for Varanasi’s development is in high gear. This is welcome news. One of the highlights being touted is a scheme for ‘sixty flyovers’ to reduce traffic congestion. This is hardly a highlight. It is shortsighted to look at Varanasi’s planning as that for any other […]