Before being a cartoonist/graphic novelist, I am a citizen first. A citizen with the freedom to have feelings — if not the freedom of free speech. Now, the former is far easier than the latter. I have the freedom to have feelings and the freedom to deal with those who hurt my feelings. And on that note, I want Sarojini Naidu arrested. Posthumously, but so be it. In an All India...
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Is ‘Didi’ Headed For a Fall? by Anuradha Sharma
Aamra ekhon-o boli ni kon kagoj porte hobe, kintu agami dine kintu setao bole debo. (Till now, we haven’t told which newspapers must be read, but in the future, we will do that as well.) – West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, speaking on March 29 in defense of her government’s decision to bar all but 13 newspapers from more than 2,400 government-approved libraries across the state. “Kunal Ghosh, associate editor...
More »Starving in India: A Fight for Life in Bihar-Ashwin Parulkar
BANWARA, India – In the fall of 2006, Gita Devi was pregnant with her sixth child when her family fell on hard times. A severe drought made it more difficult than ever to find farm work here in India’s northeastern plains. The family couldn’t afford food. It was unable to get a government ration card to buy grains and rice at steep discounts, even though it clearly was poor enough to...
More »The ‘corruption’ of the wretched
-Live Mint No other social sector programme has been criticized for being successful as has the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). So much so that it is not the inefficiency of the MGNREGS that is a problem, but its success that is seen as the reason for several problems facing the country. Even though it is still a small programme with annual spending of less than Rs.35,000 crore,...
More »Not much on the plate by Samar Halarnkar
I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...
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