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New Delhi: Women's Hockey striker Lalremsiami, has a mantra for team's success and that is to convert even the half chances into goals.

Soli Sorabjee, besides being a reputed attorney, was a noted social person. As President of India International Centre and, earlier as a member, he will always be remembered. When he was not able to stand up and walk, he would move on a wheel chair, visiting IIC almost every day. As President he had introduced many new schemes and ideas in the working of the centre. He lived up to 91 and died of Covid-19.

It was in 2017 when the Supreme Court in K.S. Puttaswamy-I recognised the Right to Privacy as a part of fundamental rights. Further, it also realised that digital privacy is as important as spatial privacy (Justices D.Y. Chandrachud and Sanjay Kishan Kaul deserve honourable mention).

We are currently facing a challenge, unprecedented in the history of the country. The pandemic has taken away countless precious lives and has left our nation gasping for breath. Once the pandemic recedes, it will leave a country that may be quite unknown to us, with deepened inequality. Furthermore, the pandemic has thrown up existential questions about our rights’ jurisprudence and institutional resilience.

A Noida resident labels doctors 'Jallad'. Loosely translated, 'Jallad' is an executioner, the hangman at the local penitentiary. But what's this lady's grouse with doctors? The family belongs to Bihar. The pandemic caught them stranded in Bhagalpur. The lady's mother and husband were found Covid-19 positive. There was no other go but to admit in a hospital. Mistake! The hospital turned out to be a horror house. The hospital staff, devils in white. The husband died unattended, lungs busted and soiled in his own excreta of several days, his wife molested by a leering compounder. It's a heart wrenching story caught on tape and doing the rounds of the Internet thanks to an unnamed you-tuber.

While home minister Amit Shah befittingly supported by his buddy, governor Jagdeep Dhankar, has been busy preparing the blue print for dismissing the Mamata government on the plea of its failure to control the election violence and placing the state under President’s rule, the five member bench of Calcutta High Court on Monday in a severe jolt to his dream design expressed satisfaction over the action taken by Mamata Banerjee to restore normality after post-results violence in pockets of the state.

Increasing instances of courts resorting to suo moto route to take up issues of public concern have perhaps attracted the tag of vigilantism by judiciary. From a purely legal perspective, there may be several pitfalls of this instrument, which can be considered to be a post-1990 phenomenon. But when a government or the ruling establishment maintains an indifferent and insensitive approach towards problems faced by the general public, one shudders to think what would have happened if the courts had refused to intervene even at the risk of being criticised for judicial activism.

The incompetence of the Modi government is starkly visible in its handling of the current crisis. It fares even worse on the vaccine front. Its belief in the ideology of free-market capitalism is that the market will magically produce whatever we need. This is why it starved the seven public sector vaccine manufacturing units of any support. And, it also gave the public sector vaccine, Covaxin, developed by ICMR and National Institute of Virology, to a private company, Bharat Biotech. It also believed that Serum Institute of India, another private sector company and the world's largest vaccine manufacturer, would make vaccines in required amounts without orders or capital support. Or that the government might need to intervene to see that India's new Quad ally, the US, does not stop the required supplies we need for vaccine manufacture.

Around 100 bloated decomposed bodies were seen floating in Ganga river in Chausa, a village located about 11 km from Buxar city, on Bihar’s border with Uttar Pradesh. The officials of Bihar suspect that these bodies might have been in the water for at least five to seven days.

The inevitable has happened. Nepal’s Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli lost the trust vote in Parliament on Monday, by 93 votes for and 124 against. But he has not resigned which political propriety demanded that he do. Immediately after the voting, President Bidya Devi Bhandari prorogued Parliament. Oli had lost parliamentary majority when the other faction of the Nepal Communist Party led by Puspa Kamal Dahal alias Prachanda withdrew support to his faction.