Shaken and Stirred

The Supreme Court of India recently threw out petitions seeking legal prohibitions on the "immorality" involved in pre-marital sex and live-in relationships. While the honorable Court refused to delve into the moral aspects and summarily discarded with the petitions on legal grounds, an article in The Hindu - the mouthpiece of the Indian intelligentsia argued how such a legal judgment could serve to encourage the misguided youth from trying more such "experiments". I took it upon myself to argue (as is my wont) back. Here is a copy of the article I sent as an entry to the newspaper: Aligning the alien I count myself as one of the youth of today. And though I am not an aggressive proponent for pre-marital sex or live-in relationships, I was shaken enough to write this response. The author has clearly misunderstood the raison d’etre of live-in relationships. They are not quite the seed of convenience as much as cynicism. In fact, it may well be countered th...

Gandhigiri is a sobriquet popularized by the movie Lage Raho Munna Bhai for the application of some of Gandhi’s principles. Although Gandhism is a much broader ideology, Gandhigiri touches the core of Gandhism: adherence to the path of Truth and non-violence with unwavering faith and utmost devotion while fighting for a cause. But, real life as we often realize, is not as rosy as Bollywood would like us to believe. So the question boils down to if Gandhigiri is relevant to people like you and I. Can we follow it? Relevance means ‘related to the matter at hand’. So, is Gandhigiri related to GenNext (the matter at hand), by what it means now , and not by what it should mean? And what does it mean? This term, coined by a cola advertisement and picked up by the mass media thereafter, is not another word for the youth. No. That would be a crass generalization. It is actually an epithet for those among the youth who have an urban lifestyle, like you and I, the ‘cool and modern’ us ...