Kusum Choppra

Kashmir is the latest flavor of the media. Everyone talks of the various political players in that field, India, Pakistan, China,Afghanistan, China, the hindus, muslims, buddhists, terrorists, mujahideens, seperatists, moderates, the Muftis, the Abullahs, the mullahs, the pandits, the Valley, Jammu, Ladakh etc etc etc. There is total silence over the key issue: not politics, not religion but economics. Kashmir does not allow non Kashmiris to own property there...a constitutional oxy moron. Just imagine the chaos if the same principle were to be made applicable in all the states of India or if Kashmiris were to be banned from purchase of property in the rest of the country! Bair haal, the issue of this piece is the economics of Kashmir. Its much vaunted handicrafts and tourist trades have yet to be resurrected after the terrorist/separatist imbroiglios. And agriculture remains nascent. For the aam aadmi, a good part of his rozi roti comes from providing goods and services to the Armed F...

How about a campaign to bring Laluji back into the Railways...is keeping a stormy petrel in absentia more important than a maverick ally who brings in trains on time and shows a profit from it too? After almost two years plus, I travelled in a train again.....it was a terrible experience for one who had gotten used to better. I remembered with more than some affection the young men who used to clean up the compartment, visible and adequate hygiene in the bathrooms and fresh bed clothes. This time, the Gujarat Mail was dirty, the Deccan Express tremendously and olfractorily unbearable. In its chair car, when the table was taken down for breakfast, the accumalated filth on the back of the chair in front destroyed breakfast appetite. Whatever happened to the routine baths given to trains at the end of each run. I wondered. Is defeating the Reds in Kolkatta's Writers' building more important than efficiency in the largest Railway network in the world?

It is indeed sad times for Indian democracy and its Fourth Estate that the electronic media is hardput to find a single positive story to report in its daily 24/7 news reports. News is full of scoundrels and scalywags, rapes, murders, scandals etc etc. Very often cricket and film stars take precedence over even the Prime Minister, while scandals dogging the stars, cricket and films and netas hog the headlines all day long. It makes one wonder: DOES NOTHING POSITIVE HAPPEN IN INDIA ANY MORE? Is no one doing anything to improve anything in this vast country of ours, touted to be the next Super Power in the world? Why is that kept under such close wraps that the media is unable to see it and report about it? Whatever happened to INDIA SHINING?

As the burkha controversy deepens with more and more European nations cracking down, it is perhaps time to stand back and take stock. There is no doubt, a security angle which cannot be ignored. A voluminous coverall with socks and sandals, gloves on the arms and only eyes visible, if the wearer has not worn goggles, it is impossible to differentiate between a male or a female, which is scary in these times of random terrorism, where weapons are whipped out and targets are often innocent civilians. On the integration front, the recent upsurge in burkha wearers had an equal impact. Take the example of Ahmedabad, replicated no doubt in dozens of other cities across India. Once upon a time, it was difficult to differentiate Hindu women from Muslim ones in Ahmedabad. If the latter were more prone to wearing flashy silver and gold in their garments, the same held true of many other communities such as the Marwaris and Punjabis, so one was never quite sure. All of a sudden, after the petr...

Educationists are facing a dire shortage of teachers of humanities subjects, leaving one wondering whether no one has actually studied in the arts stream in the recent past. WHY? This is not a very recent phenomenon. It started some decades ago when careers in medicine and engineering were considered the be–all of life; hence an emphasis on the sciences. Those who did not make it into medical or engineering colleges fell back on the B.Sc degree for physics and math, etc., for a teaching career; even law as a last resort. Such was the pull of the scientific world that there was this all out campaign to drag every possible stream of studies into the Science category, with the application of so-called scientific methods of chart-making, experimentation and statistical compilations etc . Those subjects not amenable to such tactics were ridiculed, labeled ‘out of fashion’. When the load of B.Sc graduates was found to be unemployable, at a time when the economy with surging forward with bank...

Ours is an economy based on recycling....has been since Time Immemorial perhaps. Can any of us not recall the friendly neighborhood pastiwalla taking away loads every month, the give aways to servants et all, the turning of leftovers into a paratha or a pulao? But now...the times, they are changing. Instead of handing down clothes to servants and putting the rest into a box for the annual collection drives for flood affected and disaster driven refugees, today's mems' response to the collection drives is to send driverji into the market to purchase a load of cheap clothes and bedsheets etc......"how will it look ( to my husband's boss' wife...or whoever) if I take my old bedsheets to the collection center?" Regular hand-me-downs of expensive outfits then spoil their own servants silly and cause frequent railings against servants getting bloated egos. The disaster affected have gotten so used to getting brand new stuffs, I am told, many reject used clothes, ...

Honor killings are the latest flavor of the season, just as once it was rape and earlier dowry death. Hardly does a young couple taste their married togetherness then the noses ("naak") of the male relatives gets longer and itchier and wham, bang, off with their heads, it goes. Why this extreme reaction to the most natural phenomena in the world? what are these gotras and castes after all? when did women become chattels to be used as bargaining counters by the male of the species? How did this spree of honor killing become part of our revered ancient culture? Chanakya's Arthshastra lists a bare handful of castes; few of them are original ones, the rest are the result of cross-castre marriages. From then on, through the writings of travelers like Huian Tsang, Alburni and others, plus our own venerable books and histories, down to British enumerators, the number of so-called castes has burgeoned into thousands of names of new castes created by intermarriage between ...