Articles by cmeditor

“Mine was a happy family – an extremely romantic and loving husband and two adorable kids – a daughter and a son,” says 40-year-old Kiran (name changed) who works as Procurement Head in the Infra industry. “This is what the world saw in photos, on social media, and during outings. What no one knew was that my husband had Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia. He had been admitted to the psychiatric ward twice when he was at the peak of his career. I was working hard to make ends meet as bipolar disorder had made my husband go on an excessive…

Political pundits always insist that voting is our sacred duty, and all voters must vote. They say that if the voters turn out in large numbers, it will force the political parties to promise more in their manifesto, and also strive harder to fulfill those promises. Complete coverage on Karnataka Assembly Elections 2023: Information that you will need to make an informed choice This view is too simplistic, and does not look at the democratic process beyond the election.   Firstly, just the existence of a nice-looking manifesto does not automatically result in a vibrant democracy. There are no self-correcting forces…

“Mountains are blessed places,” says Devki (named changed), 49 and mother of a 19-yr old youth, who died of drug overdose three years back. “Yet, there is a worrying side – growing drug abuse by youth, which tends to make Himachal Pradesh like neighbouring “Udta Punjab'', the title given to the drug riven state by a 2016 Bollywood movie. Devki and her family lied to the police while reporting her son’s death, as she doesn’t want to be identified as the mother of an addict, who suffered from withdrawals after his return from rehabilitation. The boy relapsed and succumbed to…

"I know my identity is much more than bipolar disorder. It is just one part of my life”. Those are the words of US-based scientist Dr Yamini (name changed), who has continues to live her life with conviction, while living with Bipolar. On the occasion of World Bipolar Day (March 30), Citizen Matters interviewed Dr Yamini on how she has coped with life and her illness. And how others can learn to cope with similar conditions. Dr Yamini graduated in Engineering from one of India’s top Indian Engineering institutes, and moved to the US where she completed her PhD. She has…

Indian cities have long suffered the absence of coherent and consistent policy-making on urbanisation. As a result, they are plagued by governance deficits, inadequate infrastructure, poor land management, unequal access to clean drinking water, repeated bouts of flooding, severe densification of some areas and poor quality of air and public spaces.  For Devashish Dhar, a former public policy specialist at NITI Aayog, these are evidence of Indian cities being a blind spot in planning and policy. In India's Blind Spot: Understanding and Managing Our Cities (Harper Collins India, 2023), Dhar examines historical processes that led to haphazard development of Indian…

One of the biggest developments from India at the COP27 held in November 2022 in Sharm-el Sheikh, Egypt, was the announcement of a Long-Term Low Emission Development Strategy. This took place at the India pavilion, highlighting the theme of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s LiFE (Lifestyle For Environment) initiative. LiFE aims to begin ‘a mass movement of environmentally conscious lifestyles that practise mindful and deliberate utilisation, instead of mindless and destructive consumption’. The energy sector has the potential to adopt such practices, cause shifts in demand behaviour and reduce emissions. The concept of an environmentally conscious lifestyle is not new. But…

“Trams still run on 40 routes in Melbourne with millions of users,” says former tram conductor Roberto D'Andrea, who along with his fellow conductor Tony Graham travelled from Melbourne to Calcutta in February to promote the five-day Tramjatra festival. “It is not merely a heritage ride but used daily by commuters as part of the public transit system”. Calcutta is no Melbourne. But it can boast of two firsts: The first Indian city to build a metro line. And the only city to still have functional tram lines. The Calcutta metro of course gets all the attention and money. The…

Can you plan a trip to Iceland for me? Can you plan a vegetarian meal for a dinner party at my house tonight? How can I productively engage my six-year-old who likes art and craft. Can you explain to me Einstein’s theory of relativity? In the real world, no one person can answer such a diverse set of questions? But in the cyberworld, there is a new entity which can. It goes by the unusual name of Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer or ChatGPT with its unique ability to generate human like responses in record time. This new entity, unveiled in…

The webinar was titled “The mysterious process of budget allocations”. The panellists were all people who had for many years studied budgets, the process and its many shortcomings. They could not solve this particular mystery. But all gave very practical steps to give the budget more meaning and substance and make it less mysterious. To me, at the end of the discussion, one thing stood out. The figures all budgets bandy about, in this case especially the thousands of crores supposedly allocated to Bengaluru, mean absolutely nothing. Their yearly presentation is a meaningless ritual that the law demands. My point…

She was about to turn 29 and was an assistant professor, having earned her PhD from the School of Management Studies at the Indira Gandhi National Open University. But like so many of Delhi’s youth, Dr Shelly Oberoi was drawn to the anti-corruption movement started by Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal in 2011. “Shelly, like thousands of others her age, converged at the rallies of the anti-corruption movement,” said a functionary of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), attached to the office of Gopal Rai, convenor of the Delhi unit. “She wanted to be part of the change that was going…