Month: October 2020

Seven years to the day when Dr Narendra Dabholkar, 67, was shot dead on Omkareshwar bridge in Pune, while on his morning walk, there is little clarity on who masterminded

With the needle of forensic findings now pointing to a clear link between the killers of journalist Gauri Lankesh, Kannada scholar M.M. Kalburgi and communist leader Govind Pansare of Kolhapur, the spotlight

“No one is touching me and I am touching no one,” said Rananjai Dixit (name changed), a migrant worker from Banda district in Uttar Pradesh. He was speaking to our

Celebrity astrologer Bejan Daruwala passed away on May 29 at the age of 90. Death, even after a materially rewarding life, is a tragedy. My sincere condolences to his family and followers.

Manusmriti (MS) is known as the code of religious tenets of the Hindus. It describes the social system which was in existence in this country ever since the Aryans settled

On Wednesday, Union AYUSH minister Shripad Yesso Naik tested positive for COVID-19. Naik is in charge of a ministry that, among other things, both tests and promotes ‘alternative’ medical traditions. There

KARACHI, Pakistan — Is the coronavirus an expression of God’s wrath, a punishment for our sins or, as some of us believers like to think, merely another sign that He

As usual as I expressed in my previous write up in the last issue, every quack loves a good pandemic because there is money to be made. These are joined

The economist J.K. Galbraith once wrote, “Faced with a choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy with the proof.”

Afew weeks ago, I took an uncomfortable trip down the rabbit hole of Covid-19 conspiracy theory videos. As a newly minted M.D. who will soon be taking care of patients

When the Black Death spread across Europe starting 1346,  science didn’t yet exist; to cope with the bubonic plague, people relied on superstition, rumor and religion. Nowadays we have the

The idea of religion as a set of beliefs that have to be practiced and not simply professed is not limited to Hinduism, Buddhism and other mystical religions, but has

As the world continues to battle the coronavirus, it is also fighting a different sort of epidemic: misinformation. This “infodemic” is just as harmful as COVID-19 itself, leading people to downplay

At the very end of the 19th century, Hugo Münsterberg, a psychologist at Harvard University, warned the American public not to expect too much from his laboratory colleagues in the