journalism
At Chennai RTO West, learn about bottlenecking
I did not really find it difficult. I am a member of the Automobile Association of Southern India, which has a government-approved system of getting your RTO services done without having to seek out brokers and touts. Today, I spent some time at the Chennai RTO (West) serving large localities in the South West of [...]
State of Chennai food safety
This scene at the junction of Kodambakkam High Road and Jagannathan Road shows the concern of the Tamil Nadu Government towards public health, and even common sense. A row of footpath vendors serve lower cost meals to patrons from what are commonly known as ‘kaiyendhi bhavans’ – cart stalls that are stand-and-eat joints. The less [...]
Chennai Regional Passport office loves touts, hates taxpayers
We keep reading in highly regarded newspapers that the whole operation of issuing passports is to be taken over by software giant TCS, on behalf of the Government of India. A recent report in The Hindu quotes a TCS executive on this, but the roadmap he gives is vague at best. There is no assessment [...]
WEF honours Iranian journalist and calls for press freedom
The World Editors Forum, which met in 2009 in Hyderabad, is holding its annual conference this year in Hamburg, Germany. It has honoured the Iranian journalist Ahmed Zeid-Abadi with the Golden Pen award, and called for greater efforts to protect press freedom. Here is the report in journalism.co.uk. Recalling the difficult circumstances of the awardee’s [...]
A sobering report on India’s poverty from OPHI
Poverty talk is mostly confined these days to prime time television, where contrived debates fuelled by puffed-up anchors and venal politicians fill the gap between commercials. In the case of newspapers, they minimally take notice of the problem. Their so-called process journalism mostly ignores chronic poverty, as it does everything else chronic — lack of [...]
How to send Reader’s Mail to The Hindu in Chennai
The Reader’s Mail column in The Hindu is one way of conveying grievances, complaints and suggestions to the Government and civic authorities such as Chennai Corporation, Metrowater, Municipalities, Panchayats and Metropolitan Transport Corporation. On July 5, The Hindu announced in its regional pages that the City Bureau would henceforth accept Reader’s Mail via e-mail. The [...]
In a nation of billionaires, children with crippled legs
During the recent IPL matches held in Chennai, there were middle class citizens who thought nothing about forking out Rs. 1,000 each to watch what has been proved to be a scandal-ridden spectacle that passes for sport. The prosperity pipeline of the IPL is so constructed, that that thirsty spectators had to pay five rupees [...]
Poddala Jayantha, Sri Lankan journalist, is attacked
This press statement issued by the Committee to Protect Journalists based in New York adds to the feeling of a systematic purge of the media being pursued in Sri Lanka, over the issue of eliminating armed resistance. The LTTE for their part were never in favour of a free press; their enemies in the Sri [...]
Sumathi Ravichandran, Regional Passport Officer, nabbed
It is not everyday that one finds a top government babu, outside whose office people normally have to wait for hours to get an audience, being marched off to judicial custody. That small satisfaction is available today, when one reads of the arrest and remanding to judicial custody of Sumathi Ravichandran, the politically connected and [...]
RTI Act brings water, can it take water out in Chennai?
According to a news report, residents of Pallavaram could get their water connections after they decided to wield the Right to Information Act against some obviously corrupt municipality officials. This is a familiar story now, and speaks of the power of the middle class when it is aware and decided to adopt legal means, rather [...]
