Now that the rules of eligibility for India’s highest civilian honour have been relaxed, that hardy perennial- Bharat Ratna for Sachin Tendulkar — has bloomed again. Namita Bhandare writes. Now that the rules of eligibility for India’s highest civilian honour have been relaxed, that hardy perennial- Bharat Ratna for Sachin Tendulkar — has bloomed again. So have a dozen others. Yes, Sachin must get it, but not before hockey player Dhyan Chand. Why not four-time World chess champion Vishwanathan Anand? And surely we must include India’s first individual Olympic gold medalist Abhinav Bindra. These are good names. Now toss in…

Opening cinema halls in defiance of militants or separatist hardliners, even under security, should be a matter of prestige if not priority. Namita Bhandare writes. HT Image Farooq Abdullah is not a man I always agree with. When he suggests that India would be better off as a ‘controlled democracy’, I roll my eyes. When he sacks his brother for disparaging Rahul Gandhi, I am perplexed. But when Farooq Abdullah says he wants cinema halls (and liquor shops) to open in Kashmir, I find myself in complete agreement. Let’s keep liquor shops out for now (after all Gujarat is also…

We must fight for real reforms, not vent our frustrations on easy targets, Namita Bhandare writes. HT Image It was not the slap that landed on Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar that alarmed me as much as Kiran Bedi’s tweet: “Pray proper Lokpal Bill gets passed in Winter session or else pent up anger may come on streets. Politicians may be targeted.” You’d think a former policewoman would know better than to tweet a thinly-veiled call to arms a day after her mentor Anna Hazare made headlines for his novel way of dealing with alcoholics with a public flogging in…

Women athletes deal with sports chauvinism everywhere, every day. Women who must observe hijab by law or custom have the additional burden of demonstrating that their athleticism does not mitigate their faith: switching games, wearing restrictive garments, performing before an all-women-audience, facing fatwas and death threats — whatever it takes. Namita Bhandare writes. HT Image In the photograph they are just numbers: 3, 14, 7. But their headscarves, covered necks and full-sleeved shirts do not mask their cheekiness. The one with #3 on her jersey has her chin up and eyebrows raised. The goofball is clearly #14, the tomboy with…

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…