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There’s no such thing as a friendly fire
On Tuesday, my father escaped what could have been a serious fire accident in his kitchen. When he recounted what had happened, I had just had news of our trekking guide in Nepal losing his mother to third degree burns she received cooking on their open hearth stove. A few days before, the granddaughter of a well-known Indian politician succumbed to burns from Diwali firecrackers. And before that, the mother of a close childhood friend passed after battling burns sustained while doing puja at home. Each one of these events is so recent and raw that I realise how callous we are about keeping our homes safe. Each of these…
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Finding Joy(a)
At three, my little brother was an irresistible cutie. He was playing in a sandpit beside a construction site one hot June afternoon when a little girl joined him. She was called Joya and was looking for friends. Her parents were visiting from Bombay and living in an enormous whitewashed bungalow beside our grandfather’s newly built house in Allahabad. She was a few years older to him and since his conversation skills were limited, he brought her over to meet his older sisters. And since friendships formed quite spontaneously without much profiling those days, we all became friends, accessing open fields and each other’s compounds freely. My grandmother didn’t like…
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Democracy 1.0 (or five remarkable things about the 2020 US Elections)
It’s coming from the sorrow in the street,the holy places where the races meet;from the homicidal bitchin’that goes down in every kitchento determine who will serve and who will eat.From the wells of disappointmentwhere the women kneel to prayfor the grace of God in the desert hereand the desert far away:Democracy is coming to the U.S.A. Democracy, Leonard Cohen Yes, like millions across the world, I was glued to my TV from November 4th until finally, CNN called the winner of the hotly contested electoral battle of 2020. Like everything about this year, the Presidential elections were unlike any other. For one, there was were just one two significant debates…
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Claiming the Earth
Several decades ago, during my first trip to Ladakh, long before Indian tourists “discovered” their own Shangri-la, I met a man perched on a boulder in the midst of the colourful bazaar. He didn’t fit into the boxes I had neatly organised in my head (this was long before I liberated myself from the boxes), so I asked him where he came from. “I am a citizen of the universe,” he said mockingly. I considered him with disdain and wondered if that was indeed the required dress code for someone who wished to inhabit a realm beyond time and space. Today, I may have moved several countries away, but a…
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The Right to Health
What do Latvia, Uruguay, and Senegal have in common? Other than very low COVID-19 fatalities, they also have a constitutional guarantee to the Right to Health. As Europe closes down in its own unique way to battle the “second” wave of the pandemic, I am drawn to the notion that perhaps things would have turned out different if countries guaranteed to their citizens, the fundamental Right to Health. By this, I don’t mean just funding departments or ministries or enabling access to public healthcare. I mean, going a step further and guaranteeing this in national constitutions. Would that tip the scales on the pandemic? Would there be fewer fatalities? Would…