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When Bharatiya Janata Party leader LK Advani famously said of the media during the Emergency that “when asked to bend, they crawled”, he received widespread praise from the intelligentsia and even from people opposed to the BJP’s ideology—because he spoke the truth about the loss of independence and professional integrity on the part of the Fourth Estate and other institutions.

A good doctor is approachable, confident, decisive, intelligent, interested, compassionate and caring, being able to absorb patient’s pain and anxieties without losing focus, treating patients as humans rather than a symptom. Dr. Pawan Vasudeva is one such doctor, who embodies in himself all such qualities. Putting patients at ease and making a difference in their lives are his other attributes. His patients are mostly senior citizens, in their twilight years. No wonder, patients left behind by celebrated former urological oncologist, head of the department-cum-professor of urology, Dr. N.K.Mohanty, following his retirement in January 2013, were taken over by him. Dr. Vasudeva is an Associate Professor, Urology, Vardhman Mahaveer Medical College and a leading consulting urological oncologist in the prestigious Safdarjung Hospital, New Delhi.

A paper, published in the world’s topmost scientific journal, Nature, on 11 September, drives home a strong case for revision of emission pattern of greenhouse gases (GHG). It is the finding of an internationally collaborative project of 15 scientists, led by an Indian atmospheric physicist, Dr Prabir Patra, Senior Scientist, Department of Environmental Geochemical Cycle Research, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), Yokohama. The title of the paper is Observational evidence for inter-hemispheric hydroxyl parity, while Nature editorial desk, assigning due importance to the conclusions in the paper, introduced it as, ’No equatorial divide for a cleansing radical.’

Most human cultures in the subcontinent and around the world consider marriage (or socially-sanctioned variants of the concept) to be the purest expression of human love in the form of permanent coupling between individuals. Of course, now there are fringe creatures born out of contemporary urban rootlessness that scoff at such societies and celebrate ‘alternative’ and ‘radical’ modes of ‘liberated’ companionship. Whether it is the idea of love as espoused by society or its self-styled ‘radical’ and voluntary outcastes, it does not run blind, in most cases. If one looks at marriage, the only socially sanctioned coupling institution with permanence as an avowed goal, it will be clear that religion, class, caste, ethnicity, language or a combination of these factors matter in most instances. Some may dislike this state of affairs for whatever private preferences, but this is how it is for society-at-large. The coupling patterns of the so-called rebels and radicals also bear out the same private prejudices, their shrill public radicalism notwithstanding. White men and women born in Christian families, whose lives, ideals and philosophies inspire certain brown urban yuppies, mostly marry white people from Christian families.

How did you come to be the way you are is one of your most important aspects. You may be a person, a culture, an institution or a company. Whether you like it or not, in the subcontinent, people are inquisitive about origins. While this line of inquiry may appear ‘backward’ to the modern-urban types, this is one of the more dependable ways in which humans have always tried to know what lies beneath public pretension – ‘castelessness’ of high-caste Hindus is a useful example.

The delight which the Muslim fundamentalists felt following reports that the centre has given Taslima Nasreen only a temporary tourist visa was short-lived, for only a day later New Delhi gave her a residential visa.

Mr. Deng Xiaoping’s leadership in China is juxtaposed by two legendaries. He was one of the greatest revolutionary in the long march to set up a proletarian society and conversely, at same time, was a great reformer of the Chinese economy. He portrayed himself as Marxist- Leninist as a man of revolution. But, as a reformer, he opposed Mao’s egalitarianism and upstaged economic reforms with foreign capital.

It’s a sign of the pathology of much of India’s mainstream media that it displays the rise of the speculative-trader-industrialist Hinduja brothers to the top of Britain’s (not India’s) billionaire list on the front page, as many papers did on May 12, while blacking out the shamefully persistent phenomena of grinding poverty and rapidly growing income inequalities in this country.

At the very outset, I should make my position on certain things very clear. I believe that there are many, many ways of being human – none of them being ‘better’ or ‘worse’, ‘progressive’ or ‘regressive’, ‘forward’ or ‘backward’ than others. There is no rank order of ‘civilizations’, cultures, millennia and the like. For that matter, I am not sure what ‘civilisation’ means, unless you define it by a set of arbitrary parameters and ascribe those parameters some kind of inherently positive value, just because you fancy them. This line of thought may be particularly irritating to those who, after their unfortunate birth in brown-land, were born-again when exposed to White people’s worldviews.

The greater Boston area of the United States of America has a very good public transportation system. This comprises of buses, local trains, boats and the metro rail. The Red line is one of the metro routes, stopping at Harvard and MIT, the two institutions where I have spent all of my academic-professional life outside Bengal. This means that I have taken the Red Line metro many, many times. One of the stations on the route is called Porter Square. Soon after the metro leaves a stop, there is a recorded voice which lets the passengers know what the next station is. The way that voice said ‘Porter Square’ was in what can be called a Bostonian accent. That is apt since the metro is in Boston, most users of the metro are from Boston and that is the accent they are most comfortable with.