Society

The delusional bubble of our so-called ‘progressive society’ is broken every year on International Women’s Day. Irrespective of how far we have developed, we still struggle to comprehend and respect simple concepts of freedom and equality, especially concerning women.  A woman's identity is not tied to a man The identity of a woman is somehow still rigidly bound by her association with a man, be it her father or her husband. A single woman is often judged. It is not just society that ties a woman to a man’s name, but also the government with some regressive policies. The recent…

It was a balmy day in a crowded antenatal clinic in the small town of Haliyal in Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka. The medical officer indicated to me that he was doing a great service to humanity by killing unborn girls. He would go to villages nearby, on a designated day once a month, to hold mobile clinics and conduct sex determination tests on pregnant women. If the results showed the unborn child was a girl, more often than not, the expectant mother — at her husband's family's behest — would come back to the clinic for an illegal abortion.…

[Part one and two of this series traced the history of Kannada signage rules in Bengaluru and the history of the Kannada movement, respectively. Part three looks at what the government is doing to promote Kannada] Rupa migrated to Bengaluru from Jharkhand a year ago. She works at a petrol station in North Bengaluru. She doesn’t speak much Kannada, though she can manage a few words. She is trying to learn Kannada by talking to locals around her, but it is not easy. The protests calling for implementing Kannada signage in Bengaluru has once again opened up conversations and resentments…

[Part one of this series explained the history of the Kannada signage issue] The protests by Kannada groups, led by the Kannada Rakshana Vedike last month, demanding that Kannada signage rules be implemented has sparked a debate in Bengaluru. Kannada groups point out that as Bengaluru is the capital of Karnataka, important communication in the city, including information on shops and businesses, must be done in Kannada. Imagine, they say, a Kannadiga coming from any other part of the state and feeling lost in a sea of English signs in Bengaluru. At the same time, the attacks on businesses and…

In November, during a fight over video games among a group of 10-year-old boys at a government-supported school in Indore, Rishi of Class 4 was attacked over 100 times with compasses by three of his classmates. In another incident of bullying, two boys from a private school in Bangalore’s Kanakapura pressured a wealthy schoolmate into repeatedly stealing money and jewellery from his house, threatening him with serious injury if he didn’t.  After he was caught red-handed by his mother, he decided to kill himself rather than face the bullies, but was saved in time. When Smriti from a missionary school…

A ritual from my childhood involved going to a local co-operative store at the end of every month with my father. Buying and storing groceries, which would last the month or even the year, was the norm of the time. But consumption patterns are getting transformed — a part of a larger, systemic change. Mumbai Grahak Panchayat (MGP), one of India’s largest co-operative consumer organisations has not escaped the effects of this change. “There is a significant change both in terms of the number of members and the number of goods ordered,” says Advocate Shrish Despande, the Chairperson of MGP. Both…

(New Krishna Bhavan on Sampige Road served its last order on December 6, 2023. The author of this article reminisces about the iconic ‘Udipi’ style darshini) Someone said long back that Malleswaram is not a place, it’s an emotion. In the last days of its existence, it felt like New Krishna Bhavan (NKB) was not a place either, it was an emotion. And what an emotion! Malleswaram was in mourning. Its residents were in shock. Numbing grief seemed to have descended over the neighbourhood, spread to all of Bengaluru and beyond, to places across the world. Anyone who had ever…

Mariappa, a resident of Silicon City, who lives a few minutes away from the city’s glittering high street, leads a challenging life. He is a pit worker in Bengaluru, eking out a living from the repulsive job of manually cleaning the gutters of the high tech city. His entire family does pit work. Mariappa rues, “My body stinks.” He adds that many pit workers, several of whom live in the heart of the city, have got diseases and have even died due to their work.  Even though manual scavenging has been legally banned, it is still practised in Bengaluru. In…

Bengaluru ranked third in the country for crimes against women, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data for 2022. While the data is not clearly indicative of whether crimes are reported more or occurring more, it does beg the question, which areas in the city are safe? Safe Yelli?, a citizen-led initiative, is hoping to answer this question. Safe Yelli? is an online tool that allows citizens to report personal experiences of sexual assault and harassment in Bengaluru. These experiences are then used to create a map of unsafe locations in the city. Mapping harassment The initiative started…

‘Hot, hotter, hottest’ might define the different seasons of Chennai, but its people exude a certain warmth that is endearing. As platitudinous as it may sound, this empathy and resilience shone through during the recent Chennai floods, as residents bent over backwards to help each other. A lot transpired in the sprawling metropolis in 2023 that gave us reason to cheer—consultations for the upcoming Third Master Plan, the vibrant Madras Day celebrations and Chennai emerging as the safest metro for women according to NCRB. But all this was overshadowed by the increasingly problematic stray dog and cattle problem; Cyclone Michaung…