*** Ronald Vivian Smith aka R.V. Smith, the nomadic chronicler of all things quaint and quirky in India’s national capital, has received the kind of obituaries to die for. Mr Smith, who worked for The Statesman in its hey day, gets a warm and wonderful sendoff from all newspapers except, of course, The Times of…
Tag Archives: M.F. Husain
Free speech gets a major boost (in the a**)
So, young Indians cannot tell their friends in what they like on Facebook, without being “pre-screened” by Harvard types (or hauled into a police station by Shiv Sena goons). So, bloggers cannot publish their “online private diaries” without the sword of 66(A) hanging over their heads. So, tweeters can be blocked and Savita bhabhi‘s enviable…
Does the media have a right to inflame?
The republication of Taslima Nasrin‘s 2007 essay on the burqa in Kannada Prabha, the riots that resulted in the death of two in Shimoga, the reported filing of an FIR against the Kannada daily and the “regret” expressed by the newspaper reopen an evergreen question: is the media within its rights to publish incendiary material…
The Indian cartoon that’s offending Australians
It takes a particular genius to feel offended by a piece of art instead of the reality it mirrors. Several students of Indian origin have been clobbered in Australia in an unceasing (and unacceptable) wave of attacks over the last few months; one of them even being killed last week. Yet, the response from both…
Bolo ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’. Bolo ‘It’s a work of art’
Not that they are sensitive to these things, but the highest court in India has delivered a stinging slap on the menacing faces of the moral police and thought thugs; the connoisseurs who know exactly what we should see, hear, wear, watch, read, write, paint, feel and think. Or else. Maqbool Fida Husain‘s Bharat Mata—a…
IJR 