A universal pension scheme for social protection must be part of a broader strategy of economic expansion different from the present neoliberal order. INDIA must be one of the worst countries in the world in terms of not providing even minimal social security for most of its people. This is not just a major failure of the development project in the country – it is also a significant cause of...

As cartoons, like all other images, are constantly subject to fresh interpretation, there is a need to set boundaries within which dissent must be tolerated; or else we run the risk of damaging the task of knowledge building Like many books, works of art, and articles that have been summarily withdrawn from public circulation, for different political reasons, and due to public pressure, the controversial 1949 cartoon by Shankar has been...

-PTI Resurrecting the issue of cartoons lampooning her sent by email by a Jadavapur University professor, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday claimed it actually contained a message threatening to assassinate her. She also alleged a conspiracy through Facebook, Twitter and SMS and said "I am being shown in Facebook. Now, it is my turn. I will show you Facebook". "Mamata Banerjee is not a cartoon. A section of the media called...

News coverage of the Aarushi case, Sachin in Rajya Sabha, and the revelation of the Bofors whistleblower added little to the discussion Have you noticed that the hilarious news spoof, The Week That Wasn’t (CNN-IBN) bears an uncanny resemblance to every day’s TV news/ discussions? We’ll call it, the news that wasn’t. News. And it goes something like this: Monday, Nupur Talwar, denied bail, was jailed in Aarushi and Hemraj murder cases. All...

Following protests from Darul Uloom, Deoband, and certain Islamic organisations, a research scholar at Meerut’s Chaudhary Charan Singh University has requested the UGC to change the subject of her post-doctoral fellowship for research on ‘Use of Magic Realism in the major novels of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth’. Prabha Parmar has communicated her decision in a letter to the University Grants Commission (UGC), which had awarded her the five-year...