In June 2008, journalist Sadanand Menon parsed the Delhi high court ruling on MF Husain's art, and said, 'No modern judgment pertaining to artistic freedom has ever quoted an artist or has been so categorical.' On Husain's passing away, we reproduce the article
An impressive body of anti-Modi films accumulating since 2002, are now a ubiquitous part of the 'documentary festival' circuit, delivering compact body blows to the reputation of Hindutva's puffed up poster boy.
The media is celebrating Norman Borlaug as a great hunger-fighter, whose intervention with the 'Green Revolution' is supposed to have eradicated hunger in India. Obviously, the real starvation is of the mind, says Sadanand Menon.
BJP's former mascot Jaswant Singh, for long, could do no wrong and was fiercely defended even when he was caught on camera dozing in Parliament or indulging in feudal and obscurantist customs like offering opium in his cupped palm to his loyalists. But an infantile desire to play Herodotus has done him in.
The learned Justices S B Sinha and Cyriac Joseph were strangely silent on how to construe the opposite, that is, if a daughter-in-law were to kick the husband or mother-in-law. Perhaps, that's what prospective daughters-in-law should be trained in, since the law is silent on it.
All of a sudden, in the space of some weeks, the nation seems to be running up a deficit on its cultural capital.
One of the biggest impediments to the social acceptance of the Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgenders (LGBT) is not so much laws and moral codes, but socio-cultural attitudes as institutionalised within language and jokes, which become the currency of the daily transaction of violence against them.
Sadanand Menon explores the latest fitness obsession of our nation and puts it in perspective.