-The Hindu Bhuira's women are coping with the higher workload by creating vastly more flexible family and community structures. And they are simultaneously pushing towards modernity much faster than their neighbours. Everyone in the village sneaks a glance when Upasana Kumari drives her White Maruti 800 to work. “Driving a car is intoxicating,” says Kumari. A winding, muddy, single lane road that starts from the edge of the hillock where Kumari’s house...
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More Equal Than Others -Usha Ramanathan
-The Indian Express The Aadhaar judgment divides the people of this country into those receiving state assistance, and others. The former will get socio-Economic Rights if they do as they are asked to do. Privacy is a luxury they can ill afford. The signs were there from the beginning. The poor were part of the marketing strategy for promoting a project that would require people to enrol in a database that...
More »These Delhi lawyers take legal aid beyond courtrooms -Aamir Khan
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: When she saw a family all at sea in the court corridors, advocate Anjali Rajput stepped in to offer free legal aid. Like her, over 130 advocates on the panel of the Delhi State Legal Services Authority (DSLSA) offer much-needed help to citizen litigants in Delhi's 11 districts, not only in courtrooms, but also through awareness camps in schools, slums, police stations and other public...
More »The social value of religious and political dissent -Rajeev Bhargava
-The Hindu Dissenters of the past in India were great moral agitators, introducing social, intellectual and spiritual turbulence in public life. Would they have survived today? Dissent is not only the “safety valve of democracy”, as Justice D.Y. Chandrachud reminded us, but vital for meaningful social life. Societies stultify when everyone converges on a single opinion or when official stories go unchallenged. Flaws congeal and social rot sets in. Right or wrong,...
More »A Shrinking Table -Shruti Lakhtakia
-The Indian Express As the elderly population grows, India faces new questions, must find new answers. During my childhood, we had a rather strict rule about having dinner together as a family. My grandparents were close to my father, and he to them. The cacophony of cross-conversations between grandparents, parents, cousins bore testimony to filial responsibility that had been deeply internalised by every generation. For a society in the throes of turbulent change,...
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