Hardik Rajgor

E arlier this year, over one lakh farmers from across India reached Delhi in March, demanding a special session of Parliament to address the agrarian crisis. The protesting farmers, showing incredible grace and dignity, spent the night at Ramlila Maidan before marching towards Parliament on Friday. Describing it as  “ one of the largest congregation of farmers ”  in the capital in recent times, the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC) pressed on its demands for loan waiver and remunerative prices for their produce.  Waivers are par for the course in our country. The Madhya Pradesh CM Kamal Nath, after winning a hotly contested election, announced loan waivers in his state. We give them more often than  Duterte  hands out the death penalty. In the last year alone,  Uttar Pradesh  announced a debt waiver of ₹36,400 crore,  Punjab  of ₹10,000 crore,  Maharashtra of ₹30,500 crore,  Rajasthan  of ₹8,000...

A rtificial Intelligence  will soon be out there to take our jobs. But as the popular Internet  meme  goes, machines can’t take our jobs… if we become machines. And so,  working crazy  is primed and stress has become a currency to flaunt. Taking a breather is for losers, real men take a paracetamol and email the project file at 3 am on a Saturday night. The gulag-like slavery and peanut-sized paychecks are so mainstream that if you leave office at 6 pm, people ask you if you’ve taken a half day. And do you dare ever ask for leave? Going on leave is so demonised in  Indian office culture , that employees feel guilt and shame even asking for a few days off — about as stressful a question as asking your boss for his daughter’s hand in marriage. He looks at you with the same level of love  Arvind Kejriwal  reserves for  Narendra Modi ; the tension could be cut with a knife. Every leave application turns into a leave negotiation that would...

T he Indian women’s cricket team is on an absolute tear in the ongoing Asia Cup, demolishing opposition with an authority that rivals world-beating sides like Viv Richards’ West Indies and Steve Waugh’s Australia. Despite proving for the umpteenth time that the quality of their game is on the same level as their male counterparts, a yawning gap exists when it comes to how they’re rewarded. The prize amount for winning Player of the Match, an honour bagged so far by captain Mithali Raj and Harmanpreet Kaur, is a paltry 250 USD. In comparison, the Man of the Match in the 2016 men’s Asia Cup final, Shikhar Dhawan, took home 7,500 USD. When it comes to getting a slice of the monetary pie, women cricketers are still getting the stepchild treatment from the BCCI. In March this year, BCCI announced new contracts for both the men’s and women’s cricket teams. A few of Kohli’s boys would be earning  14 times  more money than Mithali & Co. To sum up the irony, they decided to mak...

W hen you are the tender age of 15, you will be asked a question that will define the rest of your life: Science, Commerce, or Arts? To expect to know what you want to become at an age when you are still following  Dragon Ball Z  and  Pokémon  on Cartoon Network, is like taking the  host of a reality show  and asking him to run the most powerful country in the world. Oh wait…   To say that the pressure is immense is an understatement.  Justin Bieber  and  Prithvi Shaw  would probably be the only teenagers who can deal with that kind of pressure at that age. The cluelessness and anxiety you have about making this decision is the kind that the BJP government had before making the  demonetisation  announcement. So I did what desi kids do, turn to my  parents . Big mistake. “I scored 77 per cent, which was pretty good in the ’70s, but we didn’t have a clue what to do. So I submitted my form in a Science college, a...