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The release of 11 convicts serving life imprisonment in the Bilkis Bano gangrape and murder case from the 2002 Gujarat riots is a sad commentary on the criminal justice system that seems to have bent over backwards to please the ruling dispensation. The way the...

Afghanistan no longer hogs the limelight the way it did for months after the Taliban took over the country August 15 last year. This could probably be due to the instability that has gripped the world in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine....

India’s census has been delayed again, indefinitely, making it the first time in 150 years that it will not come on time. Let us understand why. It was supposed to be finished last year, but was not. Since 1881, even during wars in the past,...

Additional Chief Secretary (Information) of Uttar Pradesh Navneet Sehgal has recently written to district/block/tehsil information officers to monitor the news that is published at the micro level. It says that the local news is damaging the Yogi government’s image. Suddenly, a kind of babu at...

In March 1964, the New York Times reported that 38 witnesses saw or heard a brutal, drawn-out, and ultimately fatal attack on a woman called Kitty Genovese, but none did anything to help her, or even summoned the police. The report was later shown to...

Salman Rushdie had once said – Respect for religion has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire and, yes, our fearless disrespect. In a world where religious fanaticism seems to be taking over societies across the...

Celebrating the 75th year of Independence and naming it Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav and later the ‘Har Ghar Tiranga’ campaign has been treated as a historic moment in the present times. We shall refrain from mentioning here the costs involved, that the taxpayer has to...

The four stages of life, according to some of our Hindu texts, are brahmacharya, grihastha, vanaprastha and sanyasa. These are supposed to be broken into segments of 25 years each. The first quarter century is the life of studying and abstinence and poverty. For us,...

The profile of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has risen in recent times thanks to the growing number of high-profile cases involving money laundering that it is investigating. While these probes keep the agency in the media headlines, there is other evidence that the ED is...

Primary commodity prices have been on a roller-coaster ride for the past year, and especially for the past six months. In the futures markets, crude oil prices rose by 39% in the month from February 8 to March 8, 2022, from $89 per barrel to...