Time to Stop Day-Dreaming & Start Working towards Arbitration in India

A three day long conference on strengthening arbitration and its enforcement in India was recently organized by the Niti Aayog in the National Capital. It was more or less another arena where the ongoing tussle between the judiciary and the executive regarding the abysmal ratio of pending cases to the number of judges in the Indian courts came to the fore....

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Why I stopped romanticizing "unrequited love" ?

I started this weekend with a morning doze of “unrequited love” portrayed in a recently released Hindi flick . Keeping aside my not-so-favorable opinion on the quality of moviemaking, it made me reflect on how my connect with such one-sided love sagas has evolved over three decades of my life.  There was a time when Alfred Tennyson’s words “Tis better...

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The Imdad Ali case: Why executing a mental patient is severely problematic?

On October 21, 2016, the Supreme Court of Pakistan turned down the plea to delay the hanging of Imdad Ali, a 50 year-old schizophrenic man convicted in 2002 for murdering a cleric.Taking cues from the dictionary meaning of schizophrenia, as well as the Indian Supreme Court's judgment in the case of Amrit Bhushan Gupta vs Union of India 1976, the Pakistani SC...

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The Kigali climate deal - A great start to a difficult marathon

A sunny Saturday in Miami is a god-send to get the perfect tan. The fashionable tan could instead have been a health disaster had there not been the benign Ozone layer in our atmosphere which screens UV rays from reaching us. This layer has been protected through the Montreal Protocol that was signed by countries way back in 1987. Since then, substances called...

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Is parental care only a son's prerogative?

A couple of days ago, the highest court of the land delivered a verdict on a divorce case pending for almost a decade. The court held that the woman meted out cruelty on her husband by forcing him to leave his parents. The bone of contention was mainly on financial grounds. Social media erupted and was divided in its reactions – while some thought it was high...

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Stalking: "They do the crime, we do the time"

In 1976, John Hinckley Jr fell head over heels for Jodie Foster after seeing her play the role of teen prostitute, Iris in the movie “Taxi Driver”. The obsession knew no bounds and after relentlessly stalking her for 17 months, in a desperate bid to impress her, he shot the US President Ronald Reagan. The letter he wrote to her that day read, “As...

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"My dear Teacher, I am sorry for having forsaken you !"

September 5 , the birth date of Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan and celebrated as Teachers' Day in India, was never just another event on our calendars. We practiced for days perfecting each step of Madhuri's "Ek Do Teen" at the age of 4. We saved up for months to buy a grandfather's clock for the staff-room at the age of 14. The moments when you could see that...

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