Kusum Choppra

Kusum Choppra: A FREE NEW SITA : Can you imagine a Sita who welcomes freedom from the hidebound environs of Raghukul that forest sojourns offer? Continuing the recent tradition of looking at the past through new prisms comes Devdutt Patnaik’s “Sita” that retells the Ramayan to delineate this new SITA. Picking from the Valmiki and Tulsi Ramayans, Plus scores of others riddling every nook and corner of India and all the South East Asian Ramayans surviving millennia, Patnaik conjures up a truly free spirited Sita, quite, quite different from the weepy Sita mold  countless generations of women have had to cope with since Time Immemorial. Born off the furrow, taught by the numerous learned persons who partook of her father Janak’s hospitality, Sita’s learning is stunted by the rules that rule in Ayodhya. Still a virgin, she is quick to insist on accompanying the rule-obedient Ram into exile, that offers a new learning curve, never mind the celibate ascetic she call her husband....

This morning's newspaper mentioned that an H'ble bench of the Supreme Court of India is shocked that  some army officers who had been accused of  illegally selling  non-service pattern weapons were let off with a pittance of a punishment ---- a reprimand or loss of seniority, as the case may be. Had a minister or one of his family or his minions done the same, what would have been the punishment?   even a reprimand?   In military parlance, a 'reprimand'  has pretty serious connotations.  But what would civilians know of that? Consider these facts: our so-called H'ble Members of Parliaments, popularly called MPs serve just one term, whether complete or truncated by wholesale changing of allegiances, and get a full pension for the rest of their lives. on the other hand, the young people who sign up for our Armed Forces slog a full prime life for little more than a pittance, with none of the fancy allowances the MPs get, over or under the tabl...

Can you imagine a Sita who welcomes freedom from the hidebound environs of Raghukul that forest sojourns offer? Continuing the recent tradition of looking at the past through new prisms comes Devdutt Patnaik’s “Sita” that retells the Ramayan to delineate this new SITA. Picking from the Valmiki and Tulsi Ramayans, Plus scores of others riddling every nook and corner of India and all  the South East Asian Ramayans surviving millennia, Patnaik conjures up a truly free spirited Sita, quite, quite different from the weepy Sita mold   countless generations of women have had to cope with since Time Immemorial. Born off the furrow, taught by the numerous learned persons who partook of her father Janak’s hospitality, Sita’s learning is stunted by the rules that rule in Ayodhya. Still a virgin, she is quick to insist on accompanying the rule-obedient Ram into exile, that offers a new learning curve, never mind the celibate ascetic she call her husband. In his ...

 It appears that a 2009 parliamentary committee headed by Dr. Venkiah Naidu held that introducing sex education in schools would corrupt Indian values.     What Indian values are we standing up for here? Family males, school teachers, principals and other 'honorable' figures ravaging nubile young girls they should be nurturing?      Young gali ke gunde gang raping any young woman they can lay their hands on? Going back to our hoary traditions, values means that in order to secure the throne for her offspring Saytavati insisted on a vow from Bhism, that  landed Aryavrat in deadly fratricide…. what we call Mahabharat. We see the same Bhism kidnapping a trio of sisters for his inept brother ….. honestly a comedy of errors if it has not been so tragic, with one princess   shuttled back  and forth until she commits suicide with a vow for vengeance on Bhism, later fulfilled in the Mahabharat itself. The inept brother...

During a recent visit to Dubai, more than once I discovered evangelists in malls handing out Islamic literature, telling of the religion in simple formats and laying claim to 'scientific' truths propagated by the Quran, which were later picked up by scientists as western knowledge.  i read and wondered at the claims,that sounded rather familiar, if amateurishly argued.     Back home, I found an old book in my personal library, much better argued "Islam and Science" from which those truths had been picked, presumably. More recently, came recent additions to the compulsory reading list being offered to school students in Gujarat from the father of book pulping, Dina Nath Batra.   In his Tejomay Bharat, he argues that the patent on stem cell therapy for regeneration of body parts was first taken by a Dr. Balkrishna Ganpat Matapurkar! The good doctor was, it appears, actually inspired by none other than the Mahabharata in which Kunti delive...