RESEARCH

Both sides in the debate are perverts betraying mid-life crisis [ Click on the headline to read an exposition on mid-life crisis ] T here are a whole lot of things that look odd in the prevailing debate over what apparently is a non-issue: Should ‘cheerleaders’ be banned from prancing — or, is it dancing? — during the matches of the Indian Premier League? Blaming a certain minister from the Congress party in the Maharashtra Government or a certain politician from the opposition in the state, the BJP, would shift the focus away from the greater malaise that the authorities in this country suffer from. If not for raising such controversies, how many of us would know that some Mehtre and some Gadkari existed in this world numbed by an overdose of events whose importance in public perception varies in degrees as distinct as fingerprints of individuals? How many Indians outside West Bengal have heard of Subhash Chakraborty, Kshiti Goswami, Nandgopal Bhattacharya and Pratim Chatterjee? Polit

Medical students in Kolkata, India, walk in a silent rally protesting police atrocities against them during an earlier protest against quota-based programmes for Other Backward Castes __________ Anish Nair __________ T he issue of OBC reservations, which has been lying dormant for a while, has been catapulted to prominence in the public by a recent Supreme Court verdict. NDTV and IBN appear to be racing with each other in hosting talk shows featuring many opinions from either side of the divide. This issue seems to affect everyone, so there have been opinions from almost everywhere: actors, cricketers, politicians, students, bureaucrats, scholars... It seems almost everyone's had his say. When a thousand people speak, there will at least be a hundred opinions. We have heard a variety of arguments ranging from the ones that are bizzare, like "Tamil Nadu, which has 69% reservation, has the best educational standards among backward castes", to the silly ones like "they