Even by the trigger-happy standards of Hindutva outrage, what happened on Oct. 19 seemed ridiculous: some Indians, including senior Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, were angry that clothing brand Fabindia had named a Diwali collection using Urdu. They claimed that the Urdu language simply could not be associated with a Hindu festival.
There are few issues more politically sensitive in India than inflation or rising prices. With frequent elections across the federal framework and the union government being seen as responsible for economic policy, ruling parties in India go to great lengths in order to keep prices in check.
Ramkrishna Yadav or “Baba” Ramdev, as he is known to the public, shot to fame as a yoga teacher on television during the early 2000s. In 2006, he started Patanjali, a company making ayurvedic products.
Amitabh Bachchan’s 753rd tweet—the superstar carefully numbers his social media activity—was a somewhat unfunny joke on rising inflation. Fed up with rising petrol prices, a Mumbaikar goes to a petrol pump to buy “two to four rupees” of petrol in order to “spray on his car” in order to “burn it.” Clearly, it was unviable for a middle-class Indian to now even own a car.
In March, the Narendra Modi government imposed a lockdown to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. While containment measures had been used by many other countries, the scale of India’s restrictions were unique, bringing the country of more than 1.3 billion people to a sudden halt.
On Friday (April 24), as part of its press briefing on the Covid-19 pandemic, the central government put out a study that painted a rather rosy picture of the manner in which the disease will play out in India. VK Paul, NITI Aayog member and head of a committee on medical management, told the media that the Narendra Modi government’s national lockdown had dramatically slowed the rate of transmission. As a result, the growth rate of new cases has slowed.
Horrific, heartbreaking images have emerged over the past few days of lakhs of migrant workers trudging towards to their villages, sometimes braving a journey of hundreds of kilometres. The movement was precipitated by prime minister Narendra Modi’s sudden decision to effect a nationwide lockdown, starting with a “people’s curfew” exactly a week ago on March 22.
As the world grapples with coronavirus, people in most countries are turning to their governments and public health care systems to battle the pandemic. In India, however, the situation is different. With a public health care system that is in a shambles, many Indians are looking with suspicion at the state’s efforts to battle the Covid-19 disease, creating complications for health authorities to grapple with.
An acute economic slowdown, rising poverty levels and mass protests: India steps into the year 2020 in a state of turmoil.
The economic slowdown in India means hardship for Indians. Scroll.in has reported on dropping incomes as well as tight-fisted spending, even on essentials such as food.
One of Narendra Modi’s biggest policy initiatives in his first term was Swachh Bharat, the Clean India initiative. It helped Modi build his image as a statesman who looked at the big picture—as well as win votes by building toilets for millions across India.
While out to buy some haleem during the first week of Ramzan, I discovered that the popular Kolkata restaurant Saiqa had introduced a new dish: daleem. A red menu board on a tiled wall proudly advertised the dish, ensuring nobody missed it.
Delhi has a pollution emergency on its hands.
Maulana Yasin Mondal speaks slowly, his voice heavy with dismay. “I have never seen anything like this,” Mondal said. “Hindu-Muslim (tension) is unknown in Magurkhali (in the Basirhat sub-division). We are still in shock.”
In most human cultures, the birth of a child is an unambiguously happy event. This moral framework does not, it seems, apply to some sections of social media, where for the most part of Tuesday, Tweeters bemoaned the birth of a new Bollywood baby. Born to A-list film stars Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor, the boy had been named Taimur–a highly objectionable christening for some, given the name’s association with a 14th century Turkic king and one the world’s most successful conquerors.
“Every joke is a tiny revolution,” observed British novelist George Orwell in 1945 with characteristic perspicacity.
The phrase “the buck stops here” was popularised by the American president Harry S. Truman. Truman famously had the phrase painted on a small wooden board and kept on his desk in the Oval Office. He often invoked the words in his public speeches.
There are many important, even vital, things that Bengal claims to have contributed to India. Number-1-all-time-best Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, Indian nationalism and the bottom line of the WellSpring Pharmaceutical Corporation—makers of Gelusil antacid—all owe their existence to Bengal. But more than anything else, however, Bengal has touched India via a soft, pearly white globe of cheese, dipped in thick sugar syrup.
True story: While visiting his parents in the town of Naya Nangal in Indian Punjab, Aman de Guerre, a resident of the UK, decided to take a look at Google Maps to check out the towns nearby. One of the results thrown up was Lahore. Curious, he asked Google Maps for driving directions from Naya Nangal to Lahore. This is what he got:
It’s that time of the year again.
People in a vast swathe of the Eurasian continent, from Britain in the west to Bengal in the east, are speakers of languages that belong to the same linguistic group—the Indo-European family. About half of the planet’s population today speaks an Indo-European language.
A report released last week by the Pew Research Centre predicting that India will overtake Indonesia as the country with the largest Muslim population has set off the usual suspects.
The horrific attack on the office of Charlie Hebdo seems to have pitched India into a free speech maelstrom with some awkward, even depressing results. The day after the murders, HT Media’s business newspaper Mint published some of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons as a defiant protest in favour of freedom of expression. Embarrassingly, only a few days later though, it put out a notice saying that it had “removed” the cartoons. The reason for this, Mint claimed, was that the cartoons had “offended some people”. More odiously, the state moved in as well: Mumbai’s police blocked purportedly offensive social media posts related to Charlie Hebdo.
