[By Narendra Kaushik]  New Delhi:  April 10, 2015: An M.Com student puts her husband, a computer professional on notice in Dadri, a sub-division in Gautam Buddh Nagar District, over absence of toilet in his house. The husband promises in local Panchayat to construct it within a week. The young housewife is putting up at her parents’ place waiting for her ...

[By Mari Marcel Thekaekara | New Internationalist] Kathmandu: the very name conjures up some sort of Shangri-la. Images of a romantic, exotic paradise. It was a hippy haven in the Sixties and Seventies. But before that, of course, there was Everest. There was always the Himalayas, majestic and awe-inspiring to even the most blasé viewer. Serious mountaineers arrived there in ...

A marriage contract shouldn’t be a license to rape ones wife, yet in many parts of the world today it remains effectively that. Far from being new, these developments form part of a long history of laws used to legitimize rape within marriage by exempting husbands from prosecution for raping their wives.

[By Col NN Bhatia] The devastating earthquake in Nepal has brought to the fore the vulnerability of  the Delhi-NCR region to natural as well as man made disasters. It is in Delhi that there are drastic ecological and climatic changes. More heat waves, drought, increased frequency & intensity of precipitation. Climate change is indeed showing its impact. The main city areas of Delhi and New ...

[By Aishwarya Yerra] At midnight, Google changed its homepage to a funky doodle with a spinning Earth but it was their Earth Day quiz that further upped their cool quotient. Google clearly had a point here — if you want more people to celebrate Earth Day, make the campaign snazzy and one that has enough potential to go viral on ...

[By Mari Marcel Thekaekara | New Internationalist] My morning paper brought me news which was nauseating and alarming, yet which filled me with hope, all at the same time. A gutsy Sri Lankan writer has been hounded, harassed and threatened for daring to question the chauvinistic male hierarchy which forces her and other women to cover up, or else. Yes, Sharmila Seyyid, is ...

We’ve started the petition to “Urge the IPC to allow our athletes to participate in the upcoming paralympic events” and need your help to get it off the ground. We have petitioned “Sarbananda Sonowal, Lov Verma, Xavier Gonzalez, CEO, IPC, J Chandrashekhar, General Secretary PCI to take action. Will you take 30 seconds to sign it right now? Here’s the ...

[By Narendra Kaushik] Gurgaon: “Why don’t we join Narendra Modi? He is also honest and a great believer of high command culture”, I hear a voice from the back of the auto rickshaw taking us to the venue of Swaraj Sanwad (Dialogue on self rule) that Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan faction of the AAP has organised. “We joined AAP for ...

[By Mari Marcel Thekaekara| New Internationalist] Rape and sexual violence in India pop up everyday, routinely now, in our newspapers. People have become blasé about ordinary rape. Yes. I did just write ordinary rape. Even a gang-rape is fairly common news these days. Happens every single day, as does the rape of poor women – mostly domestic workers, Dalits and adivasis ...

[By Martin Zeller-Jacques|The Conversation] The recent publication of a study measuring the quantity and quality of LGBT representation in mainstream Hollywood cinema has left the industry smarting. But what really got the press going was the fact that only seven of these passed the Russo test, patterned after the well-known Bechdel test for the representation of women. The Russo test ...