What's It Like To Be Stephen Hawking, What's So Special About Kolkata Rape, Rising Inequality And Recommendations
And some cartoons
Everything about Stephen Hawking is a source of fascination: the plight of a genius trapped in an ailing body; the hint of a smile brightening a face in which only a single muscle can move; the distinctively robotic voice inviting us to share the exhilaration of discovery as his mind roams through the strangest corners of the Universe.
Against all the odds, this remarkable figure has transcended the usual boundaries of science.
[…]
In the 1960s, he was given two years to live when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. But more than half a century later he is still researching, writing, travelling and regularly appearing in the news. His daughter Lucy, explaining this extraordinary drive, describes him as 'enormously stubborn'.
Whether through the pain of his personal story or his ability to enthuse, Hawking captures the imagination. He recently warned that humankind faced a series of disasters of its own making - from global warming to artificially engineered viruses - and an article reporting his words was the most-read on the BBC website that day.
It is a terrible irony that such a great communicator cannot have a normal conversation. For interviews, the questions have to be sent in advance. Some years ago, his staff warned me not to attempt small talk because his answers even to the briefest questions take so long to compose. In the excitement of meeting him, however, I could not resist blurting out: 'How are you?' - and then had to wait guiltily for his reply. He was fine.
— David Shukman, in Introduction to Stephen Hawking’s “Black Holes - The BBC Reith Lectures” book.
There was a rape in Kolkata.
The case of rape and murder of a postgraduate trainee doctor at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata has drawn national attention, highlighting both the dire working conditions of junior doctors in general and raising questions about the lack of security for women in workplaces.
There has been much concern about what happened to the postgraduate trainee on August 9. The lack of reliable information has also led to rumours being taken as facts.
These rumours included 150 grams of semen, gangrape, broken bones, a broken girdle, the scene of the crime being demolished among others. All have come to be fake pieces of news. Who spread them and why? We can only guess.
You can find more about these rumours and sensational reports in the video below.
I saw many on my timeline share these fake stories. Of course, they likely were not aware these details were fake. But it’s been a while since then. Have they not found out that what they shared was fake? Did they issue corrections? Did they apologise for spreading and falling prey to fake news? Your guess is as good as mine here.
Conspicuously, people who shared posts about the Kolkata rape case did not bother to mention multiple, equally and in some cases more heinous, rape cases from BJP-ruled states. In one, it was a doctor who raped patients inside a hospital. In Kolkata, CCTV was functional and that’s how the perpetrator was identified. Still, in Maharashtra where school children were victims and school administration was close to BJP members, CCTVs were found “non-functional”. It was as if, a crime committed inside a BJP-ruled state, did not count as a crime. It was a regular affair. This is not to say, all was right and Mamata Banerjee has nothing to answer for; she does. There were lapses in Kolkata. And she has a lot to answer. But we keep forgetting how for instance in Uttar Pradesh, in Hathras, perpetrators were protected, how national media which is referred to as “godi media” for good reasons, sided with perpetrators and tried to vilify the victim, and how the state police burnt victim’s body at midnight in a field away from her parent’s knowledge. And also, the India Today reporter who caught this on video was hounded by the channel and the party in power.
“Major ruckus in the village right now,” Tanushree Pandey, a correspondent with India Today TV, tweeted at 1.44 am on 30 September 2020. “UP cops & officials forcing kin to cremate body overnight. Family begging that let us at least take the girl home one last time.”
Pandey was in the village of Boolgarhi, in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras district. There, two weeks earlier, a young Dalit woman had been raped by four men of the dominant Thakur caste. She was left paralysed and with a severed tongue. Uttar Pradesh authorities tried to ignore the atrocity, but as details emerged and public outrage mounted they arrested the accused. The victim died from her injuries at a Delhi hospital on 29 September. Her body had just been brought back home.
At around 3 am, Pandey tweeted, “ABSOLUTELY UNBELIEVABLE. Right behind me is the body of #HathrasCase victim burning. Police barricaded the family inside their home and burnt the body without letting anybody know.” An accompanying video showed a solitary pyre aflame in the darkness, with the police keeping a few onlookers at bay.
Pandey’s tweets went viral, adding fuel to an already raging crisis for the Uttar Pradesh government under the Bharatiya Janata Party leader Ajay Singh Bisht. Many lauded her for exposing an attempted cover-up. The BJP, meanwhile, was hard at work to diminish the gravity of the crime. Amit Malviya, the head of the party’s information-technology department, posted an earlier video of the victim describing the attack to suggest she had suffered strangulation but no sexual assault. (Malviya seemed not to care that, by exposing the rape victim’s identity, the video violated Indian law.) The Uttar Pradesh police cited a forensic report to also claim the victim had not been raped.
Pro-government trolls and media outlets attacked Pandey’s character and credibility. OpIndia accused her of coaching the victim’s family to say they were under pressure from the Uttar Pradesh administration. It based this on a clip from a leaked phone call between the journalist and the victim’s brother that, it soon became clear, had been taken out of context and misconstrued.
Pandey’s employers publicly jumped to her defence. “India Today first asks why was the telephone of our reporter, who was covering the Hathras murder, being tapped?” the organisation said in a statement. If it was the brother’s phone that was compromised, “then the government needs to answer why are the phones of the grieving victim’s family under surveillance.” The statement continued, “Persuading a victim’s family to speak out in the face of government intimidation and threats is very much a part of what a tenacious journalist must do.”
But a different story was playing out within the organisation. A former employee of the India Today Group told me that Pandey, before she posted about the forced cremation on Twitter, had tried to alert her editors about events in Hathras using a shared WhatsApp group. “But nobody replied,” the former employee said, until the story blew up. The channel had to take notice especially after Rahul Gandhi, of the opposition Congress party, shared Pandey’s video of the cremation.
Rahul Kanwal, the news director for India Today TV and its Hindi sister channel, Aaj Tak, pulled Pandey up for posting the tweets without waiting until morning for instructions on how to handle the story. Pandey was accused of throwing away an opportunity to reap higher ratings for India Today’s channels by breaking the news on air. “She was blasted by the organisation,” the former employee said. “Something as grave as the forceful cremation of a gangrape victim is happening, and they expected her to wait till morning for the team to put the channel’s logo on the footage.”
— Today’s Truth: The submission of India Today Group
Newslaundry visited Hathras four years after the incident.
In a corner of the wardrobe, a mud pot has been pushed to the back. In it are Asha’s ashes, hidden behind her clothes and dried nail polish bottles.
“We don’t intend to conduct her last rites until we get justice,” said her mother.
It has been four years since the Hathras gang-rape and murder case. In September 2020, Asha, a 19-year-old Dalit girl, was found half-naked, bleeding and barely alive just metres from her house. She died two weeks later in hospital. Her body was forcibly cremated by the Uttar Pradesh police.
Four years after Asha’s death, three of the accused are back to the village and living as neighbours to her family. Meanwhile, her own family continues to live a life of “captivity”, caged inside their own home.
In July 2024, Asha’s family informed the Allahabad High Court that even though they were supposed to be relocated and given a job, neither of it had happened. They also told the court that the security arrangements were making it difficult for them to move around. The court has sought a response from the Uttar Pradesh government.
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In her dying declaration, Asha had alleged that she was gangraped. She named four Thakur men as her rapists: Sandeep, 22, Ravi, 30, Ramu, 29, and Luvkush, 21. Three months later, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) claimed to have found enough evidence to charge the four accused men of gang-rape and murder.
However, in March 2023, two years after the trial commenced, the Hathras district court acquitted Ravi, Ramu, and Luvkush. Sandeep was sentenced to life for culpable homicide not amounting to murder. No rape charges were included in the conviction.
The trial court set aside Asha’s dying declaration and said that if the rape had happened, the victim, when she spoke to the media, would have told the reporters about it as well. It also said the medical examination had not been able to establish rape. The prosecution contended that the medical examination had happened only after 10 days and Asha had spoken about the rape to officials as well as media persons.
There’s more.
On September 30, 2020, just a few hours after Asha was cremated against the wishes of her family, her father couldn’t hold himself together. Between giving media interviews, he would walk to a corner of the courtyard and throw up, with one hand on the wall and one on his stomach.
This happened multiple times.
Amidst this, the police arrived and whisked him away to the police station. Inside, a video call had been set up. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath consoled Asha’s father and promised him a house and a government job. The same was reiterated in an official letter.
But four years on, those promises have not been kept.
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In 2021, the UP government said a new house could be given if the family gave up their current home and land in Hathras. When they refused, the state offered to relocate the family within Hathras. For the family, this defeated the purpose.The state government then told the court that the promises by Yogi Adityanath were not enforceable by law and “not mandatory”. The government also claimed there was no need to give the family a government job since they were not financially dependent on Asha.
There are so many more recent cases. But what is the point? Do we even want to look inwards and ask ourselves why some cases move us enough to talk about them and some cases just don’t register or move anything inside us? What's so special about Kolkata rape? There were rapes before and frankly so many just after Kolkata. Even if one gives benefit of doubt that everyone was living under rock and wasn't aware India clocked 100 or so rapes everyday, you certainly must have read about rapes after Kolkata since it become ‘it’ thing for media to cover these cases. Even media cannot report all of them. But so many of us have chosen to not even talk about the ones being reported. Why's that? Oh they are not rapes at workplaces? Some of them actually are. Oh not at the elite-and-sacred hospital workplace? Orissa one is. It was inside the hospital again. But the rape was by a doctor and not of a doctor? For some reason protesting doctors or people on streets or on social media ignored the case. They just did not want to mention it. After all, Kolkata case was being used to ask more safety measures and exclusive laws for medical staff. Rape and incarseration of female sex in itself was not the issue. A rape and murder in Kolkata was being utilised, rather strategically, to air old grievances. Multiple senior doctors themselves have pointed out rampant sexism in medical profession. Female doctors and hospital staff face sexism from fellow doctors on regular basis. You see where we end up by trying to wonder why we do what we do. Most of us don't really care about rape so as to talk about it or murders for that matter. We care when it happens to one of us. Because that means it can happen to us too. Meaning it's not our concern for victim that's making us speak but fear about ourselves. That's not wrong at all. But we can bring a lot of change by acknowledging it to start with.
In old news, back in 2015, BBC shot a documentary on Nirbhaya rape case. This documentary “India’s Daughter” was banned by Indian government. Why do you think?
… Mukesh Singh, one of the men convicted of the 2012 crime, in which he callously described the rape and said the victim was to blame for being outside after dark with a male friend.
… The last film to provoke a government reaction on this scale was about bloody religious riots in 2002, said Lawrence Liang, a lawyer based in Bangalore, India, who specializes in technology and copyright law.
Now don’t miss watching this newsance video, especially the baba ji portion.
A new study from the World Inequality Lab finds that the present-day golden era of Indian billionaires has produced soaring income inequality in India—now among the highest in the world and starker than in the U.S., Brazil, and South Africa. The gap between India’s rich and poor is now so wide that by some measures, the distribution of income in India was more equitable under British colonial rule than it is now, according to the group of economists who co-authored the study, including the renowned French economist Thomas Piketty.
While India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world, it is also one of the most unequal countries.
Inequality has been rising sharply for the last three decades. The richest have cornered a huge part of the wealth created through crony capitalism and inheritance.
[…]
While the Indian government barely taxes its wealthiest citizens, its spending on public healthcare ranks among the lowest in the world. In the place of a well-funded health service, it has promoted an increasingly powerful commercial health sector.
As a result, decent healthcare is a luxury only available to those who have the money to pay for it. While the country is a top destination for medical tourism, the poorest Indian states have infant mortality rates higher than those in sub-Saharan Africa. India accounts for 17% of global maternal deaths, and 21% of deaths among children below five years.
— Oxfam
Police accused of voter suppression in an Uttar Pradesh constituency
The third phase of the 2024 general election in Uttar Pradesh was marred by allegations of police violence in the Sambhal Lok Sabha constituency, with reports of Muslims being subject to lathi charges and their identity cards being confiscated... This is not the first time that the police has been accused of voter suppression during the tenure of the Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh. In December 2022, a by-election for the Rampur assembly seat was marred by police violence, with Muslim voters reportedly being beaten and denied the right to vote. The turnout in that election was only 27.8 percent—abysmal even for a special election. The BJP won the seat, which the SP leader Azam Khan’s family had held for two decades, in a landslide. The police’s circle officer for Rampur at the time, the former Olympic wrestler Anuj Kumar Chaudhary, is currently the seniormost police officer in the Sambhal subdivision.
On the morning of 7 May, Abrar, a resident of Obri, a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Moradabad district, was lining up to cast his vote during the third phase of the 2024 general election. The village has over five thousand voters, almost all of whom are Muslim. There was a long queue at the school that housed all four of the village’s polling booths, and voting had just started. At around 8.30 am, he told me over the phone, more than twenty police vehicles arrived on the spot.
“As soon as the police arrived, they ordered voting to stop and took everyone’s identity cards,” Abrar said. “They shut down the booths without giving us any reason. The women began to panic, saying that they would not vote now.” The police, he said, began assaulting people at random, including women and the elderly—he knew of thirty people who had been injured—and brought a virtual stop to polling for several hours.
Videos of a lathi charge at Obri soon began circulating on social media, but Abrar said that similar incidents took place “in all the Muslim villages around us: Raib Nagla, Mawai, Narauli, Obri, Shahbazpur, Racheta, Mansoorpur, Alampur, Mubarakpur.” They appear to be part of an attempt to suppress Muslim turnout in the constituency, one of the five currently held by the Samajwadi Party. “We told the candidates what had happened, but what can they do in front of the police?” he added. “This whole thing was meant to bully us into voting for the BJP.”
Recommendations
The English Game
I liked this one. Definitely watch if you like football and sports movies although this one has lot of other things. You also get to know of class struggles in early England. But what I enjoyed most was how professional football originated in early England.
Gonads: Dutee
In 2014, India’s Dutee Chand was a rising female track and field star, crushing national records. But then, that summer, something unexpected happened: she failed a gender test. And was banned from the sport. Before she knew it, Dutee was thrown into the middle of a controversy that started long before her, and continues on today: how to separate males and females in sport. First aired in 2018, Dutee and the story of female athletes in sport are back in the spotlight this week, at the Tokyo Olympics. Join us for an update on Dutee’s second Olympic games, and the continued role testosterone has in shaping who is on the track, and who is off.
Or in Paris Olympics recently.
Do listen to this important podcast from 2021.
The Wonder on Netflix
That’s all for this one.
I hope I was able to add some value to at least the time you spent reading this. And something among above interested you. Do write back and suggest things to read, listen and/or to watch.
Do consider sharing with your network, thank you so much.