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Namaste, Howdy!

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Post 2014, after Bhartiya Janata Party took center-stage in India, the India-United States relations saw a few surprising turns. One of those was the then US President Barack Obama’s invitation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It is important here to note that PM Modi had been barred from entering the country over U.S. concerns about the 2002 massacre of Muslims in the state of Gujarat, which occurred when Modi was the state’s chief minister. Until the US Presidential elections in 2016 which led to Donald Trump being elected as the 58th President of America, the Indo-American relations under PM Modi and Obama saw some milestones. On his first visit as the Prime Minister of India, Modi met a huge crowd at New York’s Madison Square Garden. It was during this visit that PM Modi and President Obama reach agreement on a memorandum of understanding between the Export-Import Bank and an Indian energy agency, which provided up to $1 billion to help India develop low-carbon energy
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Queer Baiting: The Whys, Whos and Whats

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June. What a stellar month for LGBTQIA+ folks. Out of the 12 months, the people of this community get one month to celebrate themselves, and joining in on the celebrations, capitalist companies change their social media display pictures, adorning it with the rainbow colours and flag emojis. There are PRIDE sales, “Get 10% off for every purchase during Pride Month!”, but there's an obvious loophole here. These companies have country-specific social media pages. For example if I own a multinational company called XYZ, it will have a social media page  ‘XYZ India’ for consumers in India. Since the annulment of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, multinational companies in India have definitely ramped up their "support" for the LGBTQIA+ community.  (Image via Melodie Vo/The Eagle Eye) Before I digress further, let's talk about Queer Baiting . So what is exactly does this term mean? Queerbaiting is a techinique used for marketing by creators in order to depi
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#MeToo and Due Process

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A common question that has been skirting the broad narratives of #MeToo is that if the movement has gone far beyond the boundaries of due process and legality. In April 2019, a few months after the #MeToo movement expanded in India, then Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi was accused of sexual harassment by a former Supreme Court of India employee. The committee that presided over investigation of the allegations included Gogoi himself, and unsurprisingly he was cleared of the charges. Prior to the case against Gogoi, in October 2018, journalist Priya Ramani accused MJ Akbar of sexual harassment. The former junior external affairs minister registered a 41-page defamation case against her. She won the case two years later when the court acquitted her of all charges.  The phrase “Me Too” was coined by African American activist Tarana Burke in 2006 to raise awareness about the prevalence of sexual abuse and assault within the society, and help the survivors. It was the fall of 2017 when
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The Un'Care'd

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According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2021 by WEF, India went down 28 places from the previous rank of 112 to currently being at 140. While the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown also played a significant role in increasing India’s gender gap by 4.3 per cent, the World Bank has estimated that female participation in the labour force has decreased to around 20 per cent over the last three decades. This decline in economic opportunities and workforce participation was initially chalked up to women leaving work to go for higher education. But the increase in the number of women going for higher education is just around 5 per cent over the last decade. In 2019, The National Statistical Office (NSO) conducted the first Time Use Survey to measure the participation of men and women in paid and unpaid activities. The survey provided information on the time spent in unpaid caregiving activities, volunteer work, unpaid domestic service-producing activities of the household members. It also inclu
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The Tussle Between Secularism and Hindutva: Maharashtra governor’s letter to the CM marks a dangerous precedent

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Secularism has gone from being a part of our constitutional to an insult and accusation.  On October 11, Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray announced that the government would not open places of worship due to the risk of Covid-19. This is reasonable because Maharashtra has the highest tally in the country, both in terms of cases and deaths- 1.5million and 40,000 deaths. The restrictions on opening of religious places will avoid crowding during festivals. In response to the Maharashtra government’s order, Maharashtra Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari shot off a letter to Chief Minister Thackeray, advising him to reopen the places of worship. The Governor went on to take a jibe at the Chief Minister by asking if he is turning “ secular ” despite the Chief Minister being “ a strong votary of Hindutva .”   The Governor’s letter is a far cry from the constitutional position of his office. That the governor found it fit to interfere in the state government’s work on a mat
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Raat Akeli Hai (2020)

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Raat Akeli Hai. (2020) Director : Honey Trehan. The patriarch of a rich Uttar Pradesh family, Raghuveer Singh is found murdered in his bedroom on the night of his second marriage. In comes Inspector Jatil Yadav, a no nonsense cop, to investigate what turns out to be a layered whodunit. It becomes clear in the very beginning that every member of the family is a suspect. Although all fingers point towards Singh's mistress and now second wife, Radha, played by Radhika Apte, who the family loathes, Jatil is in no hurry to declare her the killer. Even in the face of pressure from political leaders and seniors from the department, Jatil says with gusto, I'll dig out the truth from anywhere. A lot of reviews seem to be comparing Raat Akeli Hai with Rian Johnson's Knives Out. The only similarity between these two movies is that they're both closed room mysteries. In Knives Out, detective Benoit Blanc suspects the entire family and Jatil does the same here. As the fi
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#ALIVE

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#Alive (2020) Director : Cho Il-hyung A gamer finds himself alone in his apartment when a zombie apocalypse hits the country. He barely manages to escape from an infected person who enters his apartment, and helplessly watches people being bitten by a horde of zombies. He soon runs out of food, water, phone and internet connection, and at one point decides to take his own life. But he is saved by another survivor from the adjacent complex who shines a laser pointer at him. Finding the other survivor lends our gamer a renewed vigour and the two share food and eventually a walkie-talkie to talk. After they barely escape another mad horde of zombies, they realise they'd die if they stayed at their apartments any longer and decide to make a run for the 8th floor. Of course things go bad and zombies find them but they're saved in the nick of time by a stranger. Things start to look good only for the stranger to drug them so that his zombie wife can feed on them. They bar
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