Weekend Reads
- “For the [Supreme] Court, in this moment, to invoke its contempt jurisdiction with alacrity against criticism of it is disappointing, and disturbing,” says an editorial in the Indian Express about the contempt case against renowned lawyer Prashant Bhushan. “In fact, particularly in times such as these, the court needs to take the high road, show broader shoulders, instead of taking to task a public interest lawyer whose work has spurred legislation and made an invaluable difference in matters ranging from public corruption to pollution and displacement.”
- It has been a year since the people of Jammu and Kashmir were first denied access to 4G internet, yet the Supreme Court has done little to enforce its order saying a complete ban of this kind is disproportionate and impinges on liberty, write Gautam Bhatia and Suhrith Parthasarathy in the Hindu.
- “Instead of the government tying itself in knots to fudge the truth on the border, it should frankly acknowledge the challenge, recognise the pitfalls of personalised diplomacy, correct the neglect of defence, reverse the economic slide of the past three years, and build national cohesion,” writes TN Ninan in the Print. “As someone said, it is not enough to have a strong government, you need a strong country.”
- Vivek Kaul explains in Newslaundry why despite the long economic slowdown and the Covid-19 crisis, it isn’t likely that real estate prices will come down in India.
- “What’s being attempted now is a hostile takeover of the Tamil TV media so a right-wing lobby can control the entire ecosystem, and that can be considerably worse than anything the Tamil TV media has ever seen, as evidenced by what we see on English and Hindi news channels today,” writes Ramanathan S on The Newsminute.
- Asmita Bakshi writes in Mint about the Chinese-Indian community caught in the crossfire as tensions rise between the two nations.
- “If past patterns are a measure, many will settle in India’s Ganges Valley; by the end of the century, heat waves and humidity will become so extreme there that people without air-conditioning will simply die,” writes Abrahm Lustgarten in a New York Times magazine piece on the great climate migration to come.
- Rebecca Traister on the Cut explains how the coverage of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s recent run-in with another American legislator tells us a lot about how gendered media voices still are.
- “My parents were a crazy match for their time: nomadic tribe, Tamil scholar, migrant, first-generation learner, sceptical rightwinger (father) and shudra, mathematician, research-addicted woman in a family of ten children (mother),” writes Meena Kandasamy in an essay on The White Review. “First, I grew up knowing that we did not belong with the others who had castes, then not knowing where we belonged at all. Soon enough, I learned the life lesson that caste must be obliterated from existence.”
- Prashant Rao writes in the Atlantic on how US citizens are “finally confronting the randomness that travel and immigration are built on”.
