The Young India

Kartikey Sehgal

Social Activist Anna Hazare is fasting against corruption and in favour of a long-pending ‘anti-corruption’ bill’. (news source)

An act of desperation, defined at least by allusions to death, should be prefaced by an explanation for the desperation.

Never mind the obviousness of the situation. Death leaves no chance for any future discussions.

In the case that the people still have a mandate to vote, they may exercise it and make an informed and respectful decision. Our country has a functioning …

Kartikey Sehgal
(written for print media)

Festivals are opportunities to meet and discus shared interests and the success of any film festival should be measured by the discussions it provokes among the audience. The ongoing MAMI (Mumbai Academy of Moving Image) film festival offers hardly any scope for the participating audience to meet and comfortably discuss the films. So much so that the Mumbai Young Critics’ Special Jury, organised by the management to promote youngsters to watch international films, seems like a lost …

Kartikey Sehgal
–Drugs and economic disparity in the Indian home of the Dalai Lama. Standalone story. Other parts of the series here.

“Hey gorgeous, nice shoes”, they call out to a foreigner who is wearing shining dark red shoes. She turns to look at them; “thanks”. As a rule, the duo avoids complementing Indian women and any woman with a man. “Hey baby! You look beautiful” and “Wow, you are lovely”, they call out to women in their accented English.

I sit next to …

Kartikey Sehgal

We come on earth to live and yet we prepare for a living.

We like to claim love and lust and longing while we live but what runs parallel is murder, bombs and destruction. Does the end justify the means. Is a nuclear catastrophe important so that the survivors do not make weapons again.
Japan suffered a nuclear catastrophe and is least likely to use nuclear force today. They make the best robots and cars. Is this evolution. Survival of the fittest. On …

Kartikey Sehgal
Shows like Dadagiri make me wonder why nudity is banned in Indian cinema halls.

The image of a naked woman clasping a naked man under a satin sheet of a colour opposite to that of the bodies is less likely to make you violent than the image of a television crew member asking a contestant to get his sister so that he can rape her.

The host of this show is a skimpily clad girl with a whip in her hand who fights with one of the contestants and they talk in obscenities. The girl slaps the contestant and he slaps her back. This irks ‘the man’, the archetype of the modern muscular youth, whose latent sexuality is awakened by the slaps and who decides to express his self in generous physical and verbal abuses.

Thapas Joseph Thomas says that rebellion and cult behavior is encouraged by the media

When the book ‘The Da Vinci Code’ released many youngsters didn’t realize that Dan Brown is more a marketer than an author, a numerologist or a genius.