RajivSpeak

  Modi receiving Gates Foundation award A Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded study has found that malnutrition remains the “predominant risk factor for death in children younger than 5 years of age”, accounting for 68.2% of the total under-5 deaths, and remains the “leading risk factor for health loss for all ages” despite the Government of India's huge budgetary funding to the tune of US$1.3 billion and the "hope" that the Swacch Bharat Mission would reduce malnutrition.

Some of my Dalit friends, including Martin Macwan, whom I respect as one of the best human rights activists I have met, have a great fascination for Buddhism. Nearly all Dalit rallies or functions I have attended carry with them Buddha’s photographs. Probably, one reason could be that Dalit icon Babasaheb Ambedkar converted to Buddhism because he believed this was the only religion of India which does not believe in casteism. Many Dalits, not without reason, get converted to Buddhism. Among others, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen highly rates Lord Buddha, the word that means “enlightened.” I personally know next to nothing of Lord Buddha’s philosophy, except that it shows the path to enlightenment attained through meditation and wisdom. Sen wrote, “Our world may be very different from what Buddha faced in the sixth century BC, but we can still benefit greatly from the reasoned approach to ethics, politics, and social relations that Gautama Buddha brought to the world of human understanding....

Yesterday, I came across an unusual Facebook post by my veteran journalist colleague, Law Kumar Mishra. It recalls an incident which took place when Mishra was posted in Rajkot as the Times of India correspondent during of the worst droughts in the region in late 1980s. At that time Amarsinh Chaudhury was Gujarat chief minister. Currently Patna, Mishra compares how Chaudhary handled drought with the way Nitish Kumar has been handling Bihar floods. Alongside the Facebook post, Mishra shares a picture (reproduced above) captioned: "This is a picture released by Directorate of Public Relations, Government of Bihar on Sunday. (Encircled by me).CM in serious discussion with chief secretary, principal secretary, disaster management, his secretary etc. on floods, two of them enjoying it,may be cracking jokes". A middle-sized post, I am tempted to reproduce it: "During the worst drought in 1980s in Saurashtra-Kutch, the then principal secretary to chief minister-cum-Informati...

As I was student of English literature for five long years (1970-75), doing my BA (Hons) and MA course from Delhi University, I (quite like my classmates) never read anything about a term towards which I was to become fascinated in late 1970s -- theatre of the absurd – apparently because it was a French concept. Coined by critic Martin Esslin in his 1960 essay "Theatre of the Absurd", at that time I had only vaguely knew that it pertained to post-World War II plays written by European playwrights. My curiosity for theatre of the absurd especially arose after I saw the Hindi adaptation of a French play by Samuel Backet, "Waiting for Godot" in a theatre in Mandi House, Delhi, where I used to see lots of plays. That was late 1970s. I was told it was one of the top plays which was considered part of the absurd genre. In this play, two characters wait for the arrival of someone named Godot, who represents the ethereal, the unknown, maybe a god. The Godot never arrives, e...

An Oxford University study, “The Global Disinformation Order 2019”, has found that India is one of the seven top countries around the world where “a handful of sophisticated state actors use computational propaganda for foreign influence operations”. It adds, Facebook and Twitter has identified India, along with China, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, which use the two social media platforms “to influence global audiences.”

His name is Dhaval Chopada. A smiling young face, whom I used to meet at the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), Ahmedabad. I believe it was several months ago, after he got married, and he "disappeared". Never bothered to find out whether he had gone to some other NGO, or got an assignment elsewhere, I saw him suddenly rushing to me the other day with, smiling as always, “How are you, Rajivbhai?” Oh! Where did you disappear?, I asked him, and he replied, he is with Arvind Khuman, a lawyer and social worker with CSJ in Amreli, Saurashtra, and is currently stationed in Rajula – “just 40 km from Una, where five Dalits of a family were lynched, an incident which shot into national fame”, he recalled. Who doesn’t know the incident? The Una movement that followed threw up Jignesh Mevani, a major Dalit leader from Gujarat. Currently, Mevani is an independent MLA, won with Congress support. So what’s going on? I asked Chopada, a lean, thin, tall guy, who wore a trendy jean. Prompt came...

  A recent study published in the “International Journal for Equity in Health” has found that high levels of malnutrition has found the proportion of stunting (40.5%) and wasting (22.1%) among migrant children in the “model city” Ahmedabad were “close to the national average”, but the “proportion of underweight children (50.4%) was considerably higher.”