What a stupid thing to do !
Abortion rights in India are constitutional.
Let these Bishops go to America and preach these anti - women propaganda .
How did Mr . JCD Prabhakar even agree to this ?
Is @CMOTamilnadu agreeing to this concept of denying bodily autonomy to women?
@arunraajkg sir kindly advise your party on this. You must know better than them .
Sachin Tendulkar has finally spoken on the student protests, and I had to read his note twice: once as a fan and once as an editor. The fan was disappointed, but the editor realised that this was a textbook specimen of the kind of writing that George Orwell warned about in his essay “Politics and the English Language��.
The essay was written in 1946, but it might well have been written yesterday about this very statement. Orwell’s point was that when people want to hide something, they stop using plain words and reach instead for the passive voice, for fog, for phrases that sound like they mean something while meaning nothing at all.
Consider the line, where students are disappointed that “their hard work hasn’t been rewarded”. Rewarded by whom, and denied by whom? There was a paper leak, which means somebody leaked it, some institution failed to prevent it, and an official presides over that institution. Yet none of them appears in the statement, and neither does the leak itself. A crime with identifiable custodians has been turned into something that simply happened to lakhs of children through nobody's fault.
Then comes the list of those who must set things right: parents, teachers, friends, relatives, schools and administrators. If you read that list again slowly, you will notice it covers everyone in India except the people the students are actually protesting against, which is to say the NTA, the education ministry and the government. When everyone is responsible, nobody is, and that is not an accident of drafting. It was engineered to deflect blame.
There is also a quiet sentence buried in the middle. “A society which prioritises outcomes over effort will seek shortcuts over meritocracy” is a line about those who take shortcuts, meaning the cheat. So a note on protests around paper leaks ends up gently lecturing the leaked-upon about honesty. His father’s lovely lesson—that failure is okay but cheating is not—is again aimed squarely at individuals, while the scandal and protests right now are about institutions that failed them.
The rest of the statement is what Orwell called ready-made strips of words, glued together. Full of dreams and energy, fuel to our success, safeguard their aspirations. Nobody can disagree with any of it, which is precisely the point, for this is prose engineered so that no one in power will find a single sentence to object to.
What an actual position would have looked like is a single sentence in the active voice: The government must find and punish those who leaked the paper, and fix the system that allowed it. He wrote 160+ words to avoid writing that one.
Here’s Orwell’s full essay for those interested:
https://t.co/VlPoJdOcDG
Of the millions who have risen spontaneously against the Modi regime, most are neither Marxists nor Dalit-Adivasi Ambedkarites. Yet, Jai Bhim is the only slogan acceptable to them beyond Vande Mataram and Bharat Mata Ki Jai. There is a historic opportunity to turn this rebellion into a revolution, writes @mondalsudipto
https://t.co/vlRzNOdds8
Very sound advice. Political power rests on legitimacy, not merely numbers in legislature. The government must engage the agitating students and take credible steps to ensure integrity in examinations at all levels. The Union must also sit with all States, because most of the examinations are conducted at the state level.
Once the examination and accountability issues are resolved, energetic and determined steps are needed by the Union and States to address the real and deep crisis in education, skills and jobs. And we must introspect on the growth model which is not creating enough formal jobs, and is not inclusive enough. Small town development, serious reforms in land, labour, credit and energy pricing to spur growth of job-creating SMEs and quality of urban life are vital to promote inclusive growth. This is the greatest challenge our polity and economy face.
We are facing global headwinds: energy crisis because of supply disruption, increasing trade barriers. Massive national effort is needed to make us energy-inde pendent in the next decade. Complete electrification of transport, massive addition to solar power generation, super-fast daytime charging stations, battery storage and industrial policy mandating only EV sales over time - all are critical. Energy crops, processing network to convert biomass into fungible energy and massive rural industrialization are all vital. An integrated, all out strategy addressing inclusive growth, job creation, energy security and agricultural transformation is the need of the hour.
The student protest is a wake up call. It is a symptom of the deep-seated structural problem in our education, skills, productivity, growth, employment and urbanisation. The goverments across the country and parties should focus on the real challenge and should not be consumed by political management and power games.
If India still had a functional higher judiciary, one of the benches would have taken suo moto notice of yesterday's unprovoked police brutality in the national capital and ordered an enquiry or an investigation. But alas.
With all the forced pseudoscience projects with questionable outcomes emerging from Indian Institutes of Technology across India, degrading decades of scientific credibility, mostly from political and religio-cultural agenda from the BJP and the Ministry of Ayush, this is a timely piece. Never before seen kind of "secret war" for those who really love this nation. Science community in India needs to be stronger than ever and come together to fight this spreading blight and growing rot. The hapless public deserve our candles in the dark.
India is a horribly corrupt and terribly lawless country not because of politicians but because the people are actually stupid and spineless.
Our achievement is that we're better than Pakistan and that's because their people are even more stupid and spineless