-Manorama Online In the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon, four characters have differing recollections of the same event. Did the samurai stab himself with his wife's dagger? Which of them, if any, is telling the truth? I felt like this after the session at last month's Jaipur Literature Festival during which Ashis Nandy said, among other odd things, “It is a fact that most of the corrupt come from the...

-The Times of India The Supreme Court on Friday accused the government of trying to frustrate the functioning of courts and quasi-judicial bodies by not providing them any facilities as they found these bodies upsetting their decisions. A bench of Justices G S Singhvi and S J Mukhopadhaya made this scathing observation as the Union government failed to live up to its repeated commitment to bring in uniformity in service conditions and...

-The Hindustan Times As Sri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) extended the red carpet to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday, the Left faction of Delhi University (DU) rose in protest. SRCC had invited Modi to deliver the keynote speech at their undergraduate management festival. The invitation sparked an outrage with hundreds of students and teachers gathering to protest his visit near the SRCC College gates with party flags and...

-The Hindu The case of the juvenile offender in the Delhi gang rape is a wake-up call for investing more in a protection scheme that will stop children from turning to crime During the 11 years I worked with the emergency helpline service Childline, I have had the opportunity to befriend many children who live on the edge of society. Among them was 11-year-old Arif, who lived with a gang of boys...

-Counterpunch.org     “The rearing and guiding of a civilization must depend upon its intellectual class.”     BR Ambedkar, Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah, 1943, Delhi. I. Arrest. States are clumsy with their enormous power. When it suits the modern state, it uses it immense apparatus to constraint those who make claims upon it or who say things that denigrate this or that section of society. A college professor in West Bengal draws a cartoon of...