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At long last, there is a big news for India’s film industry from the US Academy which organizes the Oscar awards. Director p Nalin’s Gujarati film ‘Chhello Show’ has been shortlisted for Oscar nomination in the international feature film category. Apart, Rajamouli’s RRR’s track ‘Naatu Naatu’ has also been shortlisted for the original song category. In one year, the shortlisting in two categories for Oscar nomination is a double satisfaction for the Indian film lovers, both within and outside the country.

The Narendra Modi government has stepped up its attack on the Supreme Court. In the past few weeks, the union law minister, Kiren Rijiju, has been making a series of statements, both outside and inside parliament, criticising the collegium system of appointing judges as alien to the constitution and asserting that the ‘spirit’ of the constitution says it is the government’s right to appoint judges.

India has a long history of gross abuse of power and deprivation of human rights of its people in the garb of laws and legality. The system of criminal jurisprudence in the country, drawn from its colonial past, is designed to instill fear of authority and subservience to the rulers among the people, now the democratically elected government since the Independence, in the scheme of the Constitution of republican India. Draconian laws have been used to suppress the movements of the oppressed and marginalized masses, the peasants, workers, minorities, Dalit and tribal. Since 2014 when the present RSS Pariwar Union Government took over, students, artists, writers, democratic rights activists, audacious professional journalists and academics have become targets of dreaded anti-terror law, the UAPA. RSS Pariwar has made the infamous dreaded UAPA known to all people compared to little knowledge about their democratic rights conferred on them by the Constitution.

Jamshedpur: Delhi’s Kapil Kumar fired a brilliant nine-under 63 to lead the round one of the Rs. 3 crore TATA Steel Tour Championship at the Beldih and Golmuri Golf Courses in Jamshedpur.

Komera Anka Rao will never have a scarecrow on his one-acre farm at Karempudi village in Palnadu in Andhra Pradesh. The sole reason he grows crops on his only piece of farm land is to feed birds. Jaji, as he is locally known, grows pearl millets sorghum as they require less water and labour. The farm hosts a variety of birds, including Indian parrots, baya weavers pigeons, mynas and the Indian Pitta.

West Bengal CPI(M) is in a bind following a considerable section of its rank and file cosying up to their BJP counterparts. The reason is neither an ideological meltdown or desertion for fished or loaves but a desire for survival in the face of apparently overwhelming onslaught of Trinamool Congress activists.

Reports have been doing the rounds that Rahul Gandhi was planning a short break from the Bharat Jodo Yatra to mark Christmas. BJP spokespersons have been asking with sly grins what if Rahul Gandhi took a Christmas break and went to Bangkok? This, even as the ruling party was getting perturbed as the yatra ate up the miles, relentlessly leaving the BJP out of popular imagination.

China’s new COVID-19 outbreak threatens the rest of the world. Mathematical models predict one million or more deaths by early 2023, within 90 days from now. Epidemiologists estimate 60 per cent of the population of China and 10 per cent of the world are likely to be infected. This new crisis could shake the world, and India too cannot escape it, as we already experienced after Wuhan outbreak three years ago. Sudden spurt in new infections have also been noticed in Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and the US.

A relatively disappointing year-end and a possible less dramatic interplay between inflation and central bank intervention globally have India’s domestic gold trade keeping its fingers crossed over what could happen in 2023.

In a vibrant democracy, critique of policy a) makes for a) better policies, and b) helps correct mistakes as they occur. Official spokespersons will always argue that the government is doing the best under given circumstances. But today, the world is changing so fast that mistakes will occur because the past may not be a guide for the future. Further, full information is not available even about the present. So, policies are made in an uncertain environment, leading to heightened risk of policy failure. Democracy provides the self-correcting mechanism when mistakes occur.