Tag Archives: Life

Are you pursuing social change in India? Point Blank 7 invites you to join Our Better World’s Good Story Pitch to get your story told. Why would you need your story told? Because Our Better World, which is the digital storytelling initiative of the Singapore International Foundation, can professionally produce a video of your story and distribute it worldwide to ...

Delhi (WFS) – As a child she used to roam around the residential colony in Bikaner in Rajasthan, where she lived with her parents and elder sister, climbing trees, playing with the boys in the neighbourhood, taking swimming and skating lessons. All that changed the day she came back home with a grenade she had found lying on the street ...

[By Narendra Kaushik] Anoopshahr: “Did you love your daughter today?” postcard-shaped, billboards carved into walls on either side of the gate, bag to know.  “Yes we did,” the answer is written just under the question cordoned off by smileys on both sides. Walk in and you have yellow planks shored up on green-yellow painted lamp posts on your right proclaiming with a smiley ...

|By Mari Marcel Thekaekara | New Internationalist| Another horrendous rape. Two young girls, 14 and 16-year old cousins, were abducted, raped, tortured and hanged from a tree last week in Badaun, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.  It’s a completely sickening scenario. No, far worse than sickening actually. But it’s hard to churn out words or emotion, day ...

|Shahid Lone and Adfar Shah|  Kashmir has always been the centre stage for Indo-Pak conflicts and unfortunately, both sides have failed to give reasonable concessions to each other in order to solve the problem. Nearly six decades of separatist revolts, wars and militarization, coupled with continuous infiltration has caused severe damage to the peace building and reconciliation efforts.  Kashmir and ...

|By Simran Brar| I read about Adam Smith and his iconic metaphor of the “invisible hand” for the first time as a teenager in the late ’90s. The “invisible hand” refers to the self-regulating mechanism of the market, where individuals driven by their own private interests, unwittingly benefit society at large. The metaphor caught my fancy even in those early days, ...

Phones, I-pads, headphones, laptops, consoles! The truth is, technology, as wonderful as it is, seems to have created a generation of one handed zombies.Today everything is expressed via text messages or done over the internet. In all this technological mayhem, we forgotten that we live in the real world.. While we are so busy reading about others’ lives, we miss out seeing what ...

|By Anuj Shrivastava| In less than 6 days from now the nation will know who will form the next government at Centre, the voters’ verdict already being sealed in the EVMs in 502 Lok Sabha constituencies. The sharp rise in polling percentage (an aggregate turnout of 66.27% for 502 seats , over 57.94% in 2009) is being hailed everywhere even as ...

By Narendra Kaushik Hakaipara is a sprawling settlement perched on a land mass across Gourang River in Kokrajhar, the headquarters of Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC), which runs a parallel government in four districts of Assam. More importantly, it is one of the around half a dozen villages inhabited by Bangla-speaking Muslims which were flattened during the 2012 clashes between Bodo ...

By Sanjay Pandey There was a time when the sound of horses’ hooves resonating through the town of Madhepura made the men, women and even the police force scramble for cover. Rifles slung across their shoulders, groups of masked men on horseback thundered through the town, looting shops, breaking into houses and violating the dignity of women. The police would arrive only after ...