Pairokar

Technology has, without doubt, brought immeasurable relief to humanity but at the same time it has also brought along the store of difficulties and embarrassment if that is not used judiciously. Thanks to technology one can get information from one end of the globe to the other in a few seconds, but it can also cause incalculable damage if used maliciously. Vicious propaganda can be made viral by re-tweeting and sharing of the message emanating from an unscrupulous person. In a recent case of defamation filed by the Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley against the present Chief Minister of Delhi and others, the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India have refused to differentiate between the Tweet and Retweet. However, the both Constitutional Courts have not spoken a word about the merit of the case, which has been left entirely to the Trial Court to decide. The factual matrix of the case is that Mr Kejriwal had accused that the Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley of indul...

  My friend Sudhir Kumar made me available the reprint of a nearly five-decade-old book ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’, written by an American author Robert M. Pirsig. The title of the book may be weird, but otherwise, it is an absorbing book. It fascinated me for more than one reason. Firstly, the author of this book was an alumnus of the ‘Banaras Hindu University’ (BHU) in the early thirties where I also studied four decades later in seventies. Secondly, it has very deftly handled the intricacies of Buddhism, Hinduism and Greek philosophy.  Very few people know the origin of word ‘Zen’ which is derived from Sanskrit word ‘Dhyan’(Meditation), which became ‘Chan’ in China and ‘Zen’ in Japan.  One of the bestselling books of the seventies and eighties it has been printed more than forty times.   It essentially contains three books which go side by side. The first part contains the account of a motorcycle trip from Minnesota, mid-western State...

An eminent jurist Benjamin Cardozo has said that ‘the judge is not a knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty and goodness.’ Another jurist Felix Frankfurter has said that ‘for the highest exercise of judicial duty is to subordinate once personal pulls and private views to the law of which all are guardians-those impersonal convictions make a society a civilized community and not the victims of personal rule.’ These two quotations are apt in the present circumstances when the judicial discipline was thrown overboard by the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court resulting into the huge erosion in the image of the judiciary. Thanks to the timely and bold intervention of the Supreme Court, the rot that was spreading very fast in the name forum shopping and extracting favourable justice was stemmed otherwise, brokers and blackmailers would have brought further disrepute to the Institution. The controversy arose in the Supreme Court of India when a group...

By  Parmanand Pandey Filmmaker Karan Johar has made us all aware how ecstatic he is at having become the father of twins born to a surrogate mother. As a single father, he would have been well aware that there is a Surrogacy Regulation Bill pending in parliament which, once passed, will make his actions illegal and even fetch him a 10-year jail term. Johar, and other celebrities like Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan who also have children born through surrogacy, are fortunate since the proposed bill, due to be passed shortly, would have branded them as criminals. In fact, the bill is not just draconian, it flies in the face of Article 14 and 21 of the constitution which guarantees “equality before the law and equal protection of laws to all” and “protection of life and personal liberty of all persons”. The Surrogacy Regulation Bill proposes a blanket ban on commercial surrogacy and restricts ethical and altruistic surrogacy to legally wedded infertile Indian ...