By Sidharth Mishra

Delhi University may finally see redemption time. The past seven-eight years have been most horrendous for the hoary university with a very prestigious legacy. The decay started sometime towards the end of the vice-chancellor tenure of Professor Dinesh Singh, it started to sink during the time of Professor Yogesh Tyagi leading to his suspension followed by the ad hoc regime whose tenure is been comparable to the rule of Sayyid Brothers of Delhi sultanate.

Thanks to the ad hoc rule, Delhi University today has unaccountable number of professors and equally unaccountable number of associate professors and near complete absence of assistant professors. The appointment process has been stuck for the past many years, and end of the tunnel seems to be still some distance away.

By Sidharth Mishra

The much-delayed admission process of Delhi University has finally gained momentum and it’s expected that the first list of admissions should be out before October 1. The chair of the admission committee has initiated dialogues with the college principals on the probable cut-off and as the past years the impractical cut-off are all set to make screaming headlines.

The annulment of examinations by the Central Board of Secondary education (CBSE) this year, has left several lakh children looking at a vacuum as far as their future progress is concerned. Their plans for stepping onto the next stage of knowledge gathering has received a setback. Scrapping of examination is now going to make the process of admissions, more tedious and circuitous at the graduate level in the both the professional and conventional courses.

By Sidharth Mishra

This year every time that it has rained in Delhi, the government has gone to the town that it never rained like this before. However, to many the rains and the subsequent deluge has reminded of an action-adventure game developed by Frogwares, inspired by horror fiction author HP Lovecraft, named The Sinking City. The plot goes like this, the town of Oakmont is made up of seven districts which have all been affected by flooding to various degrees. The water is so polluted that it can make fatal damage to the player's health and sanity.

The pictures of office goers trudging their bike in shoulder deep water at the underpasses is similar to the graphics in the game. Since these waters on the city’s roads are from the overflowing drains and sewer lines, their potential to cause fatal illness is as much.

By Sidharth Mishra

The past week has been bad for Delhi Police. No, it has not been because of any particular spurt in crime graph but largely due to the spanking it has received from a trial court to the Supreme Court in their handling of the February 2020 Delhi riots.

Last week a trial court in Delhi came down heavily on the Delhi Police for its probe into a 2020 riots case in North-East Delhi, saying that its failure to conduct a proper investigation will "torment" the sentinels of democracy when history will look back at the worst communal riots in the national capital since partition.

The court said that the case was solved merely by filing the charge sheet without any real effort to trace out the eye witnesses, real accused persons, and technical evidence. Furthermore, the court said that the probe lacked sensitivity and skillfulness.

In another instance, Delhi High Court took the Delhi Police to task saying that placing of video clips of burqa-clad women indulging in violence cannot be the sole basis for prosecuting a woman activist from the riot-hit area. 

By Sidharth Mishra

Delivering the Independence Day address this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced opening the gates of the Sainik Schools in every state for girls. A few days later, the Supreme Court directed the opening of the gates of the much-admired National Defence Academy (NDA), which imparts graduate-level training, to young women.

Criticizing a Supreme Court order in public is not easy, so the veterans from the armed forces largely poured vitriol on the WhatsApp groups. Much of the criticism was not founded on any solid argument but for the ‘hurt pride’ of ceding turf to the other gender. One such criticism was that charity should begin at home and that there should be a greater number of women in judiciary too.

By Sidharth Mishra

The onset of economic liberalisation during the 1990s saw a major change in the Indian media too. The coming of computers, new printing technology, communication networks and easy import of news print heralded this major change.

Technology ensured newspapers expanded network with single edition papers converting to multiple editions with focus on the regional news and soft stories. Nobody understood this demand of the news market better than Chandan Mitra, who passed away in the early hours of this Thursday, after fighting a debilitating illness for about a year.

Mitra in his innings first as the executive editor of Hindustan Times for a few years and later as editor-owner of The Pioneer for several years encouraged the genre which is largely identified as civic journalism and feature writing. Print journalism till the coming of the 1990s had largely been identified with political stories but here was an editor who was pushing for a strong city page with a lot of impactful local news.

By Sidharth Mishra

The return of Taliban in Kabul could well have its repercussions in Delhi, even outside the diplomatic circles. It’s not just about the usual “terror-attack” kind of stories or the “miserable lives” they are portrayed to be living in the colonies of Delhi.  The Kabuliwalas (those who belong to Kabul) have long been entrenched with trade links in the national Capital and other parts of the country.

The Kabuliwalas, however, have not always, as portrayed in Rabindranath Tagore’s short story, been involved in trading just dry-fruits and carpets. Tagore’s famous story was made into a film by Bimal Roy with the same title in 1961. Balraj Sahni playing the iconic Kabuliwala. The film’s songs, written by Prem Dhawan and Gulzar, put to music by Salil Choudhury and sung by Manna Dey, Mohammed Rafi and Hemant Kumar, were an icing on the cake.

By Sidharth Mishra

During the early years of my career in journalism, some very sound lessons were given by the veterans then; the foremost being to question the government. The role of the fourth estate gets transformed into that of an adjunct of the government’s propaganda machinery if media gives up its ‘sense of enquiry’.

Last week the Delhi government went to town claiming it was going to bring world-class education to 30 government schools by tying up with an examination body based abroad. The advertisements were supplemented by equally big write-up lapping up the move, with none raising an eye brow.