-The Hindu A farmhouse at Igatpuri, near Mumbai yielded six skeletons. Expensive flats in posh suburbs at Andheri and Oshiwara were scenes of gruesome murders. Mumbai no longer needs horror movies or comics. Open the newspapers every morning, the horror stories hit you. Not just murder, but decapitation and further mutilation. A disgruntled man thought nothing of bashing to death six members of his family and burying their bodies. The inside...

There is a complicated relationship between abortion as such and the selective abortion of female foetuses. This dilemma is one with which the women’s movement in India has been grappling since the late 1980s. In my discussion of this dilemma, I would like to move away completely from Satyamev Jayate, the television programme, (on which a discussion has been initiated by Shohini Ghosh on kafila.org). In any case, there the...

-The Deccan Chronicle It appears that temperamental West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee is rushing to the Centre with her set of demands without checking facts. Ms Banerjee, who has been putting pressure on the Centre to bail out her debt-ridden state, had earlier shot off letters to the Planning Commission and the ministry of rural development asking why people in West Bengal had to work more to earn a day’s...

-The Business Standard It is not in the interest of food companies to advertise what their products contain, but it is in our interest to know Junk food is junk by its very definition. But how bad is it and what is it that companies do not tell people about this food? This is what the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) laboratory checked. The results were both predictable and alarming....

Q The idea of regulating the media is very much in the news. What are your views on the matter? A Obviously, the ideal way to do this would be self-regulation. I don’t think anyone in the profession has any doubt about that. Everybody agrees that self-regulation is a very good thing, but we don’t seem to move beyond that. And we are consequently opening a window for people who want...