Archives: People

For those still high after the "spectacular" Opening Ceremony of the Commonwealth Games, there's something that ought to bring them down a peg or two — India is Number One in the world in terms of the number of hungry people. And that would be 237.7 million at the last count. Proud moment for us all. No? The sobering number comes from The State of Food Insecurity in the World report released by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on Wednesday. The study is a collaboration with the World Food Programme (WFP). And it is quite biased too....

Languages have their own laws of evolution, ones that are not too different from those about species. Some languages survive, grow. Others become extinct. Some merge themselves into other languages. Others combine with another, and a third is born. The history of linguistic evolution is the history of dead languages. Humanity is a melting pot of cultures and languages are in a flux. Changes take place all the time, but most of these are not always discernible since the mutations are usually extremely slow in nature. As economic and cultural globalisation continue unbridled, growing...

For a country where the bulk of its population is below 25, here's a finding that won't surprise many: a majority of people from India do not consider themselves to be old – more than the international average. But here's something that not many would know: Indians in the age group of 18-24 years fear heart diseases most in old age (25 per cent) followed by diabetes (24 per cent) and cancer (16 per cent). ...

For a country which has a full-fledged ministry dedicated to its expatriates around the world, and also conducts an ostentatious Pravasi Bharatiya Divas with considerable sound and fury, it is rather astounding and lamentable that the government is yet to speak out against the persecution of the oldest Indian diaspora population – the Roma – in Europe. France has deported around 1,000 Roma to Bulgaria and Romania since August and has been accused by Amnesty International of "stigmatising" the community. French President Nicolas Sarkozy referred to irregular camps inhabited by...

In a society and during times, when money is said to be a determinant for almost everything, it is not surprising to see researchers striving hard to link it with happiness. The most recent one points out that money does buy happiness, or something close to it, but the effect diminishes above incomes of $75,000 a year. Now that’s a lot of money needed to purchase happiness, you will concur. That would be more than Rs 32 lakh a year in India. The research by Princeton University’s Daniel Kahneman, a 2002 Nobel economics laureate, and colleague Angus Deaton, concluded that up to a...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s assertion that the Supreme Court should stay out of the realm of policymaking is valid. But his contention that his government cannot give to the poor the grains that are rotting in State godowns is not. If anything, it is an anti-people emotion. The Prime Minister was interacting with senior editors at his residence, when he made these points. He went on to insist, “How can foodgrains be distributed free to an estimated 37 per cent of the population which lives below the poverty line? It is not possible to give free foodgrains to all the poor.”...

On August 10, a frantic message landed in the mailbox of members of a Facebook group called Save Niyamgiri. Two leaders of the Dongria-Kondh tribe’s resistance to a controversial mine in Orissa’s Lanjigarh were said to have been abducted, and had subsequently gone missing. The two men were reported to have been ambushed at the base of the hill range where they live, bundled into a vehicle at gunpoint, and driven away. They were not being held at local police stations, Lanjigarh or Muniguda. A third person accompanying them was left alone. HERE'S AN ENCOURAGING UPDATE ...

When skewed concepts of development are the watchwords of the day, it is more than likely that voices against this twisted sense of development don't see the light of day. So when a group that fights for tribal people around the world releases a report on dams, it is damned and made to disappear into the back hole of the news world. That is what happened to happened to the report "Serious Damage: Tribal peoples and large dams" that was released last week by Survival International. The report exposes the untold cost of obtaining "green" electricity from large hydroelectric dams. The...

The name Sania Mirza seems everywhere these days. Ubiquitous is what they say, I believe. In the sleazy, unimaginative headlines of newspapers. In those garish, framed boxes on websites. On sacrosanct Facebook status messages. And all-pervading Twitter, of course. For all the wrong reasons. Ok, I will concede that Shoaib Malik too is all over. Maybe more so. For all the same wrong reasons. But to me, it is Sania who matters first. That Paki Shoaib Malik is incidental, circumstantial. Come to think of it, I am certainly missing something here. What’s wrong with people? You have...

The most recurring, quoted number in India today is 1,411 – the mean count of tigers ostensibly remaining in the wild in the country. Everyone knows and everyone seems pretty upset. The number, of course, can be disputed and refuted too if needed; but that can be the topic for another discussion. What is evident is that given the rate of decline, it might be just another 20, or maybe 50, years by when tigers would vanish from our landscape. This number, till the other day, remained in the knowledge domain of wildlifers – conservationists, activists, enthusiasts. Thanks to the...