Uneet Kumar Singh

Can you recall what your thoughts were after you watched a movie based on mystic powers or supernatural beings? Recall your thoughts after you finished watching Interstellar or Twilight or Doctor strange or Vampire Diaries. Did you not start believing in those ideas? Those concepts of Supernatural beings or Mystical Powers or Space-Time continuum, might not attract zilch of our acceptability, even for a moment, in normal times but they come across as ‘truthful’ after our ‘indoctrination’ in the three hours of the movie. However, this realization stays only for few minutes before our usual rationality dawns upon us. What happens during these hours of ‘indoctrination’ that makes us put our trust in to things that we otherwise consider stupid, irrational, untrue and at times childish? Our Mind is a witch that changes our belief system through the spell of thoughts. You have control over what thoughts you give to mind and these thoughts ultimately change your belief system. So if ...

Supreme court in the recent year or so has laid profound emphasis on the constitutional morality and its prime position in Indian Jurisprudence. Indian constitution was a culmination primarily of a political struggle and not of a social struggle. Unlike America and France, India did not go through a revolution before adopting our constitution. And rightly so, our journey towards independence is called as a 'freedom struggle' and not an 'Indian Revolution'. Societal pariahs which existed before independence continued afterwards. The task of social transformation was entrusted upon constitution and its institutions. And therefore, its no wonder, that constitution and its institutions often find themselves on the opposite side of social morality. 1. Importance of Constitutional Morality Constitutional morality is a tool to achieve ideals envisioned and engraved in our constitution. Realization of these ideals demand adherence to the constitutional morality. T...

With the announcement of election dates on 11 March, country is ready to elect its new Lok Sabha. The term of the current 16 th  Lok Sabha comes to end on June 3, 2019. In a parliamentary democracy like ours, Parliament as an institution is mandated to debate, legislate and keep the executive and government of the day accountable. As we get ready for an unparalleled display of democracy wherein more than 900 million voters will exercise their right to vote, it’s a perfect time to look back and evaluate how effective our choices, that we made 5 years ago, have been. Hours of work done by Lok Sabha There exists a disappointing trend when it comes to hours devoted for legislative and other productive parliamentary businesses. The number of work hours put to productive use have largely been showing a declining trend from 1 st  Lok Sabha onward. The current Lok sabha has failed to arrest that slide in any major way. Having said that, it did perform better than th...

With the growing clamor for a grand alliance against BJP, Prime minister has derisively called such an attempt as "Maha Milaavat". He tries to bring home the point that a government of single party majority is good for nation in general and its economy in particular. However a look at the growth trajectory of the country represents altogether a different picture. In 70 years of Independence, country has been ruled by single party government for around 40 years and for remaining 30 years it has been under a coalition government rule. To get a true picture lets consider the below graph. Source: World Bank data The above graph clearly shows that India has witnessed a decent growth rate in the last two decades that have been dominated by coalition governments. Term of UPA-1 is a phase of unparalleled growth story in India's economic history.  The graph plotted above reflects the data from 1969 to 2017. In these 49 years, roughly speaking country has been under si...

Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman made a bilateral visit to Pakistan days after a diabolical terrorist attack on CRPF convoy that martyred 40 of its soldiers. Red carpet welcome to the Crown prince culminated into a $20 billion investment offer and a joint statement supposedly seen as adverse to India’s interests. In order to de-hyphenate India -Pakistan visits, Crown Prince returned to Saudi Arabia from his Pakistan visit and then came to India on 19th of February to make it look like a standalone visit. However, the domestic pressure grew on the Indian government to tone down its engagement with KSA and take a more aggressive stance against KSA for being supportive of a state that harbours terrorists spilling Indian blood. PM Modi was even asked not to break protocol by receiving him personally and at least avoid his famous bear hug. As is for all to see, PM Modi received prince personally with a warm hug, seen by many as insensitiv...

Of late, Supreme court has delivered momentous judgements based on the bedrock of Individual liberty and freedom. The recent one is the Adultery judgement. The question before the court was whether sec 497 of IPC stands the test of constitutional morality or not. A plain reading of the sec 497 gives a sense of gross gender discrimination and outright breach of article 14 of the constitution. Sec 497 as it stood before this judgement was: Adultery.—Whoever has sexual intercourse with a person who is and whom he knows or has reason to believe to be the wife of another man, without the consent or connivance of that man, such sexual intercourse not amounting to the offence of rape, is guilty of the offence of adultery, and shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years, or with fine, or with both. In such case the wife shall not be punishable as an abettor. To understand what Sec 497 meant let's refer to below i...

We  live in a society that, in a very dramatic manner with the evolution of science, has learned to ridicule the beliefs that our culture and religions have imbibed in our society. Everything that is followed under the head of customs is scrutinized from the very meagre principles and theories of science. Bizarre is the fact that 'science' which itself is based on certain assumptions is issuing writs on centuries-old customs and traditions. A question arises does science progresses only by bringing down religious beliefs? The answer is certainly not! All the eminent scientists acknowledge the limitations of Science. Problem is with, we the followers. Just because following rituals and beliefs require us to be more sincere and disciplined in our work and daily life, we tend to discard them in every possible manner. And science, since cannot justify all, becomes an institution that is brought in to legitimize such defiance. Science and Religions are two disciplines that study ...