You are here: Home Archives: A Critique of the Times
• Date: Oct 1, 2011
There was a recent move in the Maharashtra Assembly which did not go down well with anti-abortionists. The state was planning to treat female foeticide as murder, and book culprits under the Indian Penal Code (IPC). On the face of it, it appeared a welcome step towards addressing the skewed sex ratio issue. But delve a bit deep, and the contours of the debate change – for the issue is also a lot about semantics and definitions.
Fauzia Khan, minister of state for public health, announced in the legislative council that the public health department had asked its law and judiciary...
• Date: Aug 28, 2011
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 shower running while shaving their legs, wasting around 50bn litres of water a year...
• Date: Aug 28, 2011
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 shower running while shaving their legs, wasting around 50bn litres of water a year...
• Date: Aug 23, 2011
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 parking violation. Those were not the days of 24/7 television, but she became a...
• Date: Jun 7, 2011
When a leopard strayed into and then gracefully left Hema Malini’s bungalow in the Dindoshi area of northwest Mumbai a week or so back, it became an off-beat news item. Something that people ought to have found funny. What with the Dream Girl finding a new fan, and all that. The incident, however, was anything but off-beat. The news media, by and large, missed the point by miles. The point often lies in contextualising an incident, in this case it certainly had. The myopic failed to notice the spots.
It would have been a heaven-sent opportunity to paint the larger picture of the...
• Date: Jun 7, 2011
When a leopard strayed into and then gracefully left Hema Malini’s bungalow in the Dindoshi area of northwest Mumbai a week or so back, it became an off-beat news item. Something that people ought to have found funny. What with the Dream Girl finding a new fan, and all that. The incident, however, was anything but off-beat. The news media, by and large, missed the point by miles. The point often lies in contextualising an incident, in this case it certainly had. The myopic failed to notice the spots.
It would have been a heaven-sent opportunity to paint the larger picture of the...
• Date: Jun 7, 2011
Vodafone Essar’s decision to shoot off a legal notice to a customer for purportedly defamatory comments on his Facebook page goes beyond the legal nitty-grities of publishing comments in cyberspace – it is a frontal attack on free speech, and shows utter contempt for consumer dissent.
At the dawn of the social-networking phase of the Internet age, corporates had wallowed over what all wonderful things social media could do for them. They had gone to town about empowerment of citizens, and secretly exulted at the rich financial dividends that social media could reap for them....
• Date: May 16, 2011
No sooner had Mamata Banerjee made her “I am a simple man” gaffe on CNN-IBN, than Twitter went ablaze. Digs and jokes ranged from the derisive to the racist. And sexist, of course. They went on.
Yes, accents and pronunciations can indeed be funny. Quite often. And if you are a pundamentalist, you can always have a rolling day out in a multi-lingual country like India. But this Mamata ‘slip of the tongue’ was more a ‘slip of the mind’, and it was certainly not punny.
...
• Date: May 12, 2011
The West, led by the United States, has been incessantly pounding Libya in the name of humanity the last few days. Saving humanity, so we are told. Yet, the gravest humanitarian crisis of our times remains grossly neglected by the same self-righteous nations. If the rape of 400,000 girls and women in a 12-month period is not a humanitarian catastrophe, what on earth can be one? If the rape of 1.8 million women in the 15-year Democratic Republic of Congo conflict is not macabre, what on earth can be?
...
• Date: May 9, 2011
In August last year, India’s beleaguered conservationists found something to cheer about after the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) announced that the elephant would now be declared the country’s National Heritage Animal. Whatever that meant. Minister Jairam Ramesh also declared emphatically that the ministry would constitute a National Elephant Conservation Authority (NECA) with the same degree of visibility, importance and criticality as accorded to the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA). Conservationists blew the trumpet. The media too painted the...
