Articles by Lavanya Donthamshetty

It was 11.25 am on a hot Thursday morning. I had been sitting on a hard wooden stool for roughly 70 minutes at that point and my butt was uncomfortably numb. There was no end in sight to my vigil. I was waiting for a notary, whom I didn’t know from Adam, to issue me a signed official document (on a Rs 20 stamp paper issued by the government, no less!) certifying I was who I claimed to be. All this, so that I could move a step forward in getting my residential address changed on my driving license. If…

Jyoti Singh Pandey. Qandeel Baluchi. Shakti steel mills. Kopardi. Rohtak. Dalit. Muslim. 22-year-old. 14-year-old. 6-year-old. Strangulation. Rape. Acid attack. The crimes are varied, as are the ages of the victims, the location, their religion. Even the method of attack. What's common in every one of these cases, and more of the kind, is the fact that all of the victims are women. Crimes against women are on the rise and every day, women everywhere are losing their life and liberty as easily and as carelessly as bugs get crushed under our feet. But we are always able to move on,…

V. Balakrishnan IPS, popularly known as 'Balky', is one of Chennai city's top cops. A student of Mass Communication, he understands the power of communication and the role of media thoroughly and uses the might of social media to keep the people appraised of what goes on in his precinct. Women's safety is a subject close to his heart and he sat down for a chat with Citizen Matters one afternoon, discussing various aspects of it. Q. Is the city becoming more unsafe for women? Actually, if you look at the statistics, there is no actual increase in crime against…

When Civic Mindedness Triumphed Over Apathy For all those times we have walked past a mound of garbage on the street and turned our nose up to declare: "ugh! What filth! Why isn't anyone doing anything about it?", a whole bunch of us decided to stop passing the buck and get into the swing of things ourselves. It was time for Clean Up on an epic scale. It was pre-dawn, on a Sunday morning. Time usually spent in stockpiling on sleep and stubbornly resisting the family members' perky efforts to rise and shine. But this was not one of those…

“Don't forget! May 16!” scream the posters. They are quite hard to miss, plastered as they are onto every vertical surface in the vicinity of any government building, local corporation school, bus shelters, trees or any random wall left standing. Election fever has the state in its grip and the media is full of the campaign trails of the main parties contesting for the 236 seats in the TN legislative assembly. The results will be declared on May 19th and the party that has won a majority of 118 seats will take charge of the state legislative assembly. For old…

It is hard to miss the election talk that has permeated through every thread of the society. At the corner shop, during the auto ride to the market, at the school gates, waiting in line to buy milk, paying off the parking guy at the beach – the elections and what it means to Chennai life is the 'trending' topic now. So what do the people of Chennai want from their leaders? There is a general air of discontentment that is widely prevalent, a feeling of “meh! As if anything's going to change!” that is common to Chennaivasis from across…