When the British ordered the exclusive use of the Nagari script in school in 1880 to meet a Hindu demand in the state of Bihar, the Muslims howled. The Hindi-Urdu duel in the end exploded into Hindu-Muslim war. In free India, Hindi gained the national stature as a symbol of Hindu pride and spread nationwide like wildfire, partly thanks to[Read More...]
It has taken my slow brain a long time to figure it out but finally, as 2021 comes to an end, I have found a sure shot way of bringing about a social and political revolution in India. A transformation that will sweep away Indian society’s deep caste and class inequalities, deepen democracy and end the venal politics of hatred[Read More...]
Golden names like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Desmond Tutu invariably surface on the mental canopy of world public when topics as human rights, liberation struggle, human freedom and the like, especially when those of the oppressed, suppressed, persecuted and downtrodden among coloured and black peoples go afloat. The last of the above noble souls left the[Read More...]
Photo Credit—Jan Swasthya Sahyog Recently when top Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan withdrew from surrogate advertising of smokeless tobacco (SLT), it was welcomed but with a caveat- some other popular film actors still continue to contribute to booming sales of a product that is the number one cause of a very serious oral cancer crisis in S.Asia. The Cigarettes and Other[Read More...]
This may sound either arrogant or forgetful, but I could not possibly remember the number of times I was in the same room or at the same protest as Desmond Tutu. And the main reason I know he was there is because I was there listening to him speak, often from a distance of not more than two meters or[Read More...]
“Oddly enough, it (potato) was introduced to the Himalayas by two Irishmen, captain Young of Dehra and Mussoorie and captain Kennedy of Simla, in the 1820s. The slopes of Young’s house, ‘Mullinger’, were known as his Potato Farm. Looking up old books, I was surprised to learn that the potato wasn’t known in India before the nineteenth century, and now[Read More...]
An era has ended with the passing away of an anti-apartheid hero on Sunday, December 26. Archbishop Desmond Tutu left us at the age of ninety. He was in the forefront of the struggle against brutal white minority rule in South Africa. A Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Tutu was famously known for his quotation; “If you are neutral in situations[Read More...]
By Shobha Shukla & Bobby Ramakant Covid pandemic is a grim reminder of what can go wrong when we do not work with an integrated “One Health” approach to human health, animal health, food system and climate. The critical link between these sectors, has only deepened over the years. But will our public health approach pass the litmus test of[Read More...]
It is a paradox—and a very worrying one too- that in the middle of overall high levels of prosperity the burden of mental health problems is very high in several rich countries and appears to be increasing in some important contexts. In the USA 1 in 4 adults suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year, according to[Read More...]
Comrade Raj Kishore left us at 2 in the morning on December 22nd in his village Champaran., battling illness since 2014.At time of death he was 89 years.He devoted his entire energy when alive into the liberation of the masses. Even a non Maoist or non Marxist liberal may admire his contribution towards serving the people. Tears literally flow in[Read More...]
