-The Hindu Barely days after the controversy surrounding Kamal Haasan’s movie Vishwaroopam rocked the world of cinema, a painting exhibition at the Delhi Art Gallery in Hauz Khas village here on Monday was targeted by activists of Durga Vahini, women’s wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, who disrupted the private show for sometime. Although the VHP claimed that it had stopped the show, the police said the exhibition was very much on...

-The Times of India Sociologist Ashis Nandy's controversial words at the Jaipur lit fest are being debated heatedly but there is one thing that is difficult to argue with: there is a lack of representation from the backward classes and tribals in the upper echelons of power in West Bengal. Over the last 100 years, he said, "nobody from the other backward classes (OBCs), the backward classes, the scheduled castes and...

-The Indian Express On the Delhi rape case, let’s keep the indignation, disturb legislative slumbers The Verma Committee Report (VCR) speaks against civil society and political rape cultures. The poignancy and urgency of the VCR owes much to the experience of conversing with rape survivors and traumatised children. A precious message of the VCR is this: one may not take law reform seriously without taking human and social suffering equally seriously. The committee...

-IANS LUCKNOW: With security often seen as a status symbol, the Uttar Pradesh government is spending a whopping Rs 120 crores of public money a year to provide security cover to around 1,500 VIPs of different hues, deploying as many as 2,913 police officials, officials records show. Inspector general of police (Law & Order) Badri Prasad Singh admitted that 1,476 VIPs (very important persons) were being given security based on "pre-emptive threat...

-The Times of India KOLKATA: While the country celebrates the seventh anniversary of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), Bengal continues to be one of the poor perforMers. The Paschimbanga Khet Majdoor Union alleges that a group of vested interests, "comprising landed farMers, industrialists and a section of the intelligentsia" were working in tandem to subvert the positives of NREGA in the state. The union, which has criticized both the...