we are like this only

Sports films are a relatively newer genre in India and there have been very few films in the genre. Dangal is a classic sports film in the sense of an underdog (underbitch?) who fights against the odds to get to where she is, the early success, arrogance, fall and then the clawing back to victory. The classic redemption story. But the true story is much more gritty than that. It is the fight against patriarchy, against social norms, against gender dominance by the male, against the stereotypical role of daughters and the traditional father-daughter equation that prevails in Haryana, which is one of the states with the highest gender imbalance. Dangal does a decent job of portraying all of this, even while it glosses over the many struggles that must have taken place in real life against the expected mores and behaviours society dictates for women, in favour of a focus on the relationship between father and daughters. What Dangal does even better is to underline the terrible co...

I’m no economist, despite an undergrad degree that claims the contrary. So, to be honest, I fail to understand the rationale behind the demonetization move. I mean, I’m sure (and hopeful) that someone somewhere has thought this through and that somewhere in the longterm cost-benefit analysis, the pains of poor people going without meals and real middle class people (Not my friends on social media – all of us must now admit that our origins may have been middle class but we are firmly in the fatcats class) dying while queueing up to withdraw money for their daughter’s weddings will all prove to have been worth it. Hopefully the epitaph will read ‘Never before have so few sacrificed so much (55 lives at present count) for so many’ and not the other way around (Never before have so many sacrificed so much for so little)! But as of now, I’m honestly stumped. Can someone explain to me how this scheme is supposed to benefit the country? There were a few rationalisations given: 1 ...