Justice Katju’s views on journalists are over-the-top, over-generalised. Namita Bhandare writes. When the new chairman of the Press Council of India says he has a low opinion of the media and journalists are of “poor intellectual level”, you can just hear the hurrahs from the cheap seats. With the finesse of a pugilist, Justice Markandey Katju delivered his observations to Karan Thapar on CNN-IBN. He then went over the same points in The Hindu: the media are “anti-people” because they focus on such “non-issues” as filmstars and cricket instead of honour killings and poverty. Self-regulation doesn’t work. The council must…

There’s a gap between the law and reality when it comes to gendercide. Namita Bhandare writes. HT Image The 40th anniversary of legalised abortion in India went by unnoticed. Women’s groups remained silent. The government was quiet. And there was virtually no mention of this landmark legislation in media. Perhaps there was a reason for the sobriety. Forty years after the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, abortion is now increasingly being used to kill unborn daughters. The situation is grim and United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) says 7,000 fewer girls are born everyday in India than should be. The Lancet…

Are we the world’s greatest conspiracy theorists? The question struck me while watching two eminent doctors argue with Mark Toleman, one of the co-authors of a Lancet article on the presence of a superbug in Delhi’s water. Namita Bhandare writes. HT Image Are we the world’s greatest conspiracy theorists? The question struck me while watching two eminent doctors argue with Mark Toleman, one of the co-authors of a Lancet article on the presence of a superbug in Delhi’s water. Lancet had reported last week that Delhi water samples had tested positive for the multi-drug resistant superbug, NDM-1. But the doctors’ chief…

LK Advani’s yatra is a last-century tactic to deal with this century’s problems, writes Namita Bhandare. HT Image Oh-ho, there he goes again. Like an Annual Day school theme, every edition of LK Advani’s rath yatra comes with its own slogan. This one’s against corruption. And black money. Heck, it even has its own rock anthem: ‘Ab bus’ (Bus? What happened to the rath?). If you’re looking for novelty, look elsewhere. In the past one month, six different politicians will be rolling out their own yatras. There’s a ‘sewa yatra’ by Nitish Kumar and a ‘kranti yatra’ by Akhilesh Yadav.…

Domestic violence rages in India even today because society allows it to, writes Namita Bhandare. HT Image A day before she died, Supriya Sharma called up her mother and said, “I fear for my life.” It was the last time she would ever speak to her. Supriya had been married to Chandra Vibhash Sahu, a surgeon at the Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital for under a year. The families knew each other; the fathers had been colleagues in Jharkhand. It should have been an ideal marriage. It wasn’t. Within weeks, Sahu began beating his wife. She complained to her parents. He…

When they’re not scamming the country, disrupting Parliament or schmoozing with businessmen and film stars at cricket matches, our netas fall back on their next favourite past-time: Saving Bapu. Namita Bhandare writes. HT Image When they’re not scamming the country, disrupting Parliament or schmoozing with businessmen and film stars at cricket matches, our netas fall back on their next favourite past-time: Saving Bapu. We have a fine tradition of Saving Bapu. In 2009 liquor baron Vijay Mallya saved Bapu by coughing up Rs 9.27 crore for assorted memorabilia including his sandals and glasses. In 2007, the government threatened YouTube for…

There are few memorials for terror victims here. We don’t honour the dead, writes Namita Bhandare. HT Image The remarkable thing about the Ground Zero memorial is not its aesthetic or its scale or even that Dubya and Obama had buried party differences to come together to honour the 3,000-odd lives lost ten years ago on September 11. The remarkable thing about it was that it existed. We’ve had our 9/11s too, far too many of them. An estimated 8,856 civilians have been killed in terror strikes (not including left-wing terrorism) across the country since 2001, according to the South…

The phone had started ringing minutes after the bomb blast at Delhi high court’s gate number five. Facts were still fuzzy: was it a bomb in a briefcase? How many injured? Any dead? Was there a second blast? Twitter was abuzz and so was my phone, writes Namita Bhandare. Already the front pages are crowded: Air India plane buys are under fire, BJP leader LK Advani dares government to arrest him in the cash-for-votes scam and did Reliance violate government norms? Two days ago there was no other news. The phone had started ringing minutes after the bomb blast at…

Another Day HT Image Autumn was to have been the season of hope; a time for words and ideas, listening and learning. A time for the Harud (autumn) literature festival which would have made Srinagar join that membership of cities in the region that host lit fests – Jaipur, Kovalam, Karachi, Galle, and Thimpu. Kashmir is a long way from Jaipur where the same organizers, Teamwork Films have managed to achieve such iconic status that hardboiled journalists like Tina Brown call it the ‘greatest literary show on earth’. It was also at Jaipur this year where the organizers attempted a…

The government’s attitude to private healthcare is crippling. Namita Bhandare writes. HT Image Two days ago, Vijay, who works with me as a driver, came to me in tears. His wife was seriously ill. He had to rush to the village where she lives, and he needed a loan. Where had she been admitted, I asked. “Private mein,” came the reply. Vijay embodies many of the statistics on healthcare: 80% of India’s healthcare expenditure comes from private sources; government spends a pathetic 0.9% of our GDP on healthcare (compared to Brazil’s 3%) and medical expenses are a big reason for…

Parliament must rise more often — every day in fact — to preserve its sanctity HT Image Outside there was passion and intensity; inside reason and erudition. Outside, cries of Vande Mataram and invocations to Anna Hazare. Inside, references to history and invocations to the Constitution. Outside, angry people feeding soundbites to insatiable TV cameras. Inside, ideologically opposed men on Right and Left arguing calmly for the dignity of office. The contrast couldn’t have been starker, or more ironical. On a day when public anger against corruption was spreading from town to town, a different sort of battle, but also…

While we raise children to be independent, why is it so difficult to let them go? Namita Bhandare writes. HT Image It didn’t hit me until I saw my dog. Now if you’ve never seen my dog Nigel, there is no way you could possibly know that he is the fattest, laziest Labrador ever. But that day, just one week before departure, he heard the bell ring and ran to the door to greet my elder daughter, Teesta. Ran? I was startled. Nigel never runs. Had he guessed that a week from now she would be leaving home for college?…