After three nominations in the past, Leonardo DiCaprio finally won an Oscar for the Best Actor in 2016 for his impeccable performance in ‘The Revenant’. The point to note is that his award acceptance speech was nothing about himself! Spanning a much celebrated career and global fame, DiCaprio chose to speak about global warming instead.…
Let us revisit a small tale from the Mahabharata to get a better understanding of the term “Akshaya Patra”. This goes back to the time when the Pandavas and queen Draupadi were living in exile. In those days, a lot of their acquaintances used to visit them in the forest which formed their temporary residence.…
India’s duel with poverty has been going on for decades. With the nation being home to one-third of the world’s poor for a long time, it has never been easy for the larger part of our population to make ends meet. The country’s impoverished state has also played a major driver of the total illiteracy…
While it is difficult to know the exact number of NGOs in India, an exercise by the Indian Government found that at least 31 lakh NGOs are operational in our highly populated land of unity in diversity. We have a plethora of volunteers working to the effect of social causes such as education, animal rights,…
Back in the 14th century, an outcast was someone excluded from society for committing a crime or breaking the law. An outcast was someone like Robin Hood, he was celebrated. However, the definition underwent a drastic change by the time we got to the 21st century. Now an outcast is a depressed person, lurking in the…
It was a wintry night when a tiger invaded Salim’s house and hauled away his younger brother. It was an endless struggle of scars and paws but eventually, the man-eater won. Salim was shrouded with anguish forever. When I first met Salim… It was part of one my 2017 visits to a primary school…
Ours is primarily an agrarian economy, with much of rural India still practising agriculture as their main occupation. As cities continue to expand, devouring chunks of cultivable land, our poor farmers struggle to arrange for their daily bread. It is terrifyingly ironical that the one who puts food in our bowls prays for a grain…
For people like us in the 21st century, convenience is the new buzzword. We have Facebook to make new friends, Instagram to click aesthetic photos and the 280 characters of Twitter to air our opinions without any inhibition. This need for convenience has seeped into our bones so deeply that we want to do even…
Humans have a tendency to apply unnatural techniques to nature, destroy it and then employ technology once again to repair it. We have been circling in the loop for ages. Our ancestors never banked on coal and petroleum. They relied on the Sun. And guess what? That’s the solution we need. Instead of getting…
We have all grown up dreading the word ‘cancer,’ for the way it shows itself up in our lives like a sudden ghost. And since most cases of cancer in India are detected at a rather mature stage, the bandwidth of successful recovery is quite narrow. This has earned cancer a bad reputation of being…