Who put the bhang in the Holi song?

In the Hindi film song universe, the intoxicant is a relatively new addition to the festival of colours.

In the infectious Holi song Balam Pichkari (Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, 2013), lyricist Amitabh Bhattacharya writes, “Itna mazaa kyon aa raha hai, tunay hawa mein bhang milaaya” (Why am I having so much fun, you have mixed cannabis in the air).

When bhang is floating in the air, the atmosphere turns into a frenzied spectacle of music and dance. In most Holi songs, the cannabis plant preparation is implied through lyrics or depicted through visuals of revellers downing tall glasses of thandai, a concoction of milk, dry fruits and bhang.

Bhang is a relatively recent addition to the depiction of Holi in Hindi films. Popular tunes celebrating the festival of colour between the 1940s and the ’60s were more religious in nature, focusing on the legend of the god Krishna, who coloured the face of Radha to match his blue skin tone.

Songs such as Phagun Ki Rut (Holi, 1940), Bheegoyi Mori Saree (Shaadi, 1941), Holi Ka Din Hai (Renuka, 1947), Khelo Rang Hamare Sang (Aan, 1952), Holi Khele Nandlala (Raahi, 1953), Holi Aayi Re Kanhai (Mother India, 1957), Arre Jaa Re Natkhat (Navrang, 1959), Tan Rang Lo (Kohinoor, 1960) and Holi Khelat Nandlal (Godaan, 1963) refer to the playful interactions between Krishna and Radha. None of these songs has any room for bhang.

Bhang is strongly associated with Shiva. In folk tales, he is often cited smoking the ganja form of the cannabis plant. So when did bhang swing into the Holi melody?

Mehmood flops about like a thirsty bird in need of a cool drink in Zara Si Aur Pila Do Bhang from the 1968 movie Kaajal, but it is in the ’70s that bhang appears to have become indispensable to Holi festivities.

The jaunty RD Burman tune Aaj Na Chhodenge (Kati Patang, 1970) features portly men grinding the cannabis leaves into the bhang paste. Swooning men wait with empty glasses for a thandai refill. Kamal (Rajesh Khanna) implores merrymakers to drop their guard, while Madhu (Asha Parekh), dressed austerely as a widow in white, pines for the same happiness as others.

In the 1974 film Aap Ki Kasam, Rajesh Khanna and Mumtaz dance to the trippy sounds of Jai Jai Shiv Shankar. The song, composed by RD Burman and written by Anand Bakshi, acknowledges Shiva’s contribution to the intoxicant thandai through the words “Ke pyala tere naam ka piya” (We toast our goblet to you). The pyala is spiked with bhang, since the actors consume the libation on Shivratri.

The tune also doubles up as a Holi special, presumably because of its association with Rajesh Khanna and bhang.

Jai Jai Shiv Shankar from Aap Ki Kasam (1974).

After Khanna, another superstar, Amitabh Bachchan, famously gulped down a glass of thandai and sang Rang Barse in Silsila (1981). Bachchan formalises the presence of bhang and its wonderful side-effects on anyone with an off-key pitch and two left feet. Although lyricist Javed Akhtar does not include bhang in the words, the visuals suffice.

Songs such as Hori Khele Raghuveera (Baghban, 2003) and Rang Dalo (Banaras, 2006) incorporate visuals of people grinding the plant into a paste. In Anu Malik’s composition Koi Bheege Hai (Mumbai Se Aaya Mera Dost, 2003), Abhishek Bachchan carries forward the legacy of his father’s enthralled spirits when he lip-synchs the lyrics written by Sameer, “Koi bheega tarang se, koi bheega hai bhang se” (Some are intoxicated by music, others by bhang). No truer words have been sung.

How Thousands Of Americans Lost Money To Fake Call-Centres In Mumbai?

By LIKHAVEER

73 people have been arrested in the racket where US citizens were cheated out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It took just two days for J Roy (name changed) to figure out that all was not quite above board at the call centre he had just joined, having had several years' experience in business process outsourcing units or BPOs.

"It just didn't seem right," he told  when he was brought to court on Monday.

Roy is among 73 men and women who have been arrested in a widespread call-centre racket busted in Thane district near Mumbai in which callers, posing as American tax agents, coerced victims in the US into paying up online after telling them that they had defaulted on their taxes. The police suspect that the roots of the racket go back to Ahmedabad and have said it could be much wider than what they have uncovered so far.

On Monday, all the arrested accused were produced before a Thane magistrate. Thirteen have been remanded to further police custody and the rest have been sent to judicial custody.

Murky business
The call centre that Roy worked at was one among more than 10 that have been raided in Thane district over the last week, starting from October 4. He had spent a month there and was due to get his salary this week, but the police swooped in on his centre.

Looking back, Roy said with a smile, he knew that “the American Internal Revenue Service doesn’t call anyone”.

With a script ready for employees that ranged from mildly threatening to downright aggressive, the goings on at these purported call centres were far from right.

The call-centre employees, posing as US Internal Revenue Service agents, would use Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP – voice calls made using a web connection – and would tell their prospective victims that they had failed to pay their full taxes and would have to pay up or face further action. The convinced callers would make an online payment using a credit card.

Several thousand Americans – police are yet to estimate the number of victims – were conned into parting with small and large sums of money. The masterminds of the racket are still at large. The police said that about seven people had put their money into setting up these call centres and operating the racket. However, 73 mostly junior employees have been arrested so far. More than 630 are also under investigation.

The IRS regularly puts out advisories about fake calls such as the ones these centres were making. Despite this, in rented premises, the purported call centres managed to run a lucrative racket, that has fetched around Rs 500 crores in a year, according to reports.

From the script
Most of the callers were young men and women – in their 20s and 30s – who had responded to advertisements and flyers announcing openings at call centres or had heard of them through word-of-mouth. Knowledge of English was generally enough to get the job.

They were then primed with a script based on anticipated responses. Some of the conversations went like this:

Statement: Where are you calling me from?

Answer: I am calling you from the INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE HEADQUARTERS which is located in Washington DC.

Statement: Where was the miscalculation (error) found?

Answer: Well, Mr customer let me make you aware that we are calling you from the investigation departments and not from the audit department and hence we cannot help you to where did you do the mistakes (sic).

Employees were trained in how to sound menacing, and taught to ask questions like, "What is your intention now, would you like to resolve this case or are you looking for a dispute?”

Callers who asked why they had not been sent the paperwork by mail or heard about the problem earlier would be told that attempts had been made to reach them, but to no avail. They would also be told no further paperwork could be sent across as it was lying in the court house.

Those who sought to speak to their accountants would be told this meant the IRS could charge them up to $50,000 as a fine and inform their employers and the media.

An accent trainer, among those arrested last week, helped the callers work on their diction and delivery and develop what the trainer described as a “neutral sounding" accent – something that would presumably not peg them to a specific country.

The scripts also took into possible scenarios where people would not agree to pay up easily and gave instructions on how to tackle those. For instance:

Scenario 1
Answer: I have already paid the IRS

Caller: What we are investigating about is the miscalculation seen in your tax filed which makes us assume your intention was to defraud to IRS and the income tax law (sic).

Scenario 2
Statement: I am not going to make any payment over the phone.

Answer: …I am here to guide you so that you can go ahead and make the payment and resolve the matter outside the court house so we can go ahead and cancel the arrest warrant.”

Scenario 3
Statement: My accountant files my taxes.

Answer: Well Mr Customer, let me make aware that federal government has not allow to hire any third party for your taxes (sic)… the law suit is filed against you. So you are the responsible person for it.”

Tell-tale signs
A relative said his nephew had worked in call centres before this and was trained to simply repeat what they had been taught without thinking too much. “That is how these things usually work,” he said.

For employees, however, there were several tell-tale signs. There were no formal identity badges, no work contract at the time of joining and most significantly, no salary slips. Employees were paid in cash, with salaries starting from Rs 10,000 monthly for about eight hours of work. This was alluring for school dropouts or young people from lower-middle-class families.

"We started to realise something was wrong, but everyone is tempted by money," said the relative of one of the accused. “When a young man has a steady income it is good for him and for the family.”

An employee who worked at one of the raided call centres on a night shift had not met his wife in a month before he was arrested last week. “He said to me, ‘I have to show them I am working hard,” his wife told Scroll.in. “His job was simply to supervise, he did not make calls.”

One of the accused claimed they realised something was wrong only about four or five days before the police raided the centres. Many had been working at the establishments for just a couple of months or a few weeks and were waiting for their salaries.

“Our children are also victims,” said a relative of one of the arrested accused. “They were only employees, doing as they were told.”

Big fish at large
The relative of another employee said: “The police needs to go after the masterminds, not the employees, who were the small fry.”

The police, however, believe that it is unlikely that the employees had no clue what was going on.

The police said that a team has just returned from Ahmedabad, the possible starting point of the operation.

“There are likely to be more [such fraudulent centres],” said Param Bir Singh, Thane commissioner of police.

The raids were conducted over the past week in Thane. Many of the centres were renting out premises in a single building. “It is an industry,” said a senior police official. “We have learnt so much in investigating this case.”

The three First Information Reports registered in the case so far include charges of cheating and cheating by impersonation under the Indian Penal Code and sections of the Information Technology Act, including those related to sending menacing messages.

Police conducted the raids based on tip-offs they received and also found that the call centres had been operating without the requisite permissions.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the US is expected to formally contact the Thane police in connection with the scam.

Police estimate that the racket was running for a year, but say that further details will only be gleaned once they nab the main accused in this case. The purported mastermind, believed to have fled the country, is a 23-year-old identified as Sagar Thakkar alias Shaggy, who has no previous criminal record, police said.

Some reports said that some “gang members” were operating from the US, but the police did not comment on this.

Any Solutions For The Illegal Organ Trade Thrives In India?

By LIKHAVEER | INNLIVE

Kidney and liver diseases are growing in India. But the number of cadaver donations remains low.

On June 24, Mukesh Chaddwa died of kidney failure in Mumbai. His name featured in a waiting list maintained by Mumbai’s Zonal Transplant Coordination committee for people requiring a life-saving kidney transplant. The patients registered by the committee are allotted a kidney when the family of a brain-dead patient consents to donate his or her organs.

History Revisited: How Mumbai's Textile Mill Strikes Led To The Birth Of 'Energee', The Popular Flavoured Milk

By LIKHAVEER | INNLIVE

The milk brand manufactured by the government grew popular through an ad campaign in the early 1980s.

Read the local newspapers of any city and certain stories seem to repeat themselves. In Mumbai, one such story is the impending demise of Aarey, the only government-run milk supplier in the city.

Yummy For Your Tummy... With A Twist!

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Film Review: ‘Rustom’ Is A Tacky Timepasser About The Historic Nanavati Trial

By RAMAN KAPOOR | INNLIVE

Akshay Kumar plays the naval officer who kills his wife’s lover and becomes the subject of tabloid frenzy.

The 1959 Nanavati trial that resulted in the abolition of the jury system in India has been adapted at least twice for the screen, but neither Yeh Rastey Hain Pyar Ke (1963) nor Achanak (1973) captured the complexity of the event. However, the latest production, Rustom, isn’t even trying. Tinu Suresh Desai’s film, written by Vipul K Rawal, is unabashedly tacky and unintentionally hilarious, though it does have its moments.

Hospitals In India And Corporates Are Duping New Mothers By Feeding Babies Formula, Not Breastmilk

By M H AHSSAN | INNLIVE

Three months ago, I delivered a healthy baby boy at a private hospital in Bengaluru. However, I didn’t get to hold or feed him until several hours later. And much to my disappointment, and without my consent, he was given infant formula for his first meal.

Turns out, I’m not the only new mother to whom this has happened. Two years ago, 31-year-old photographer Sannika Chawla delivered a child in a reputed private hospital in the city. Although she had had a normal delivery, hours after the birth, hospital staff fed formula to Chawla’s baby as the exhausted mother rested a few feet away.

In Focus: How To Curb The Dengue Disease More Effectively?

By LIKHAVEER | INNLIVE

Besides notification, the government will have to identify ways to involve the private sector to get more accurate figures on dengue cases.

On June 9, the Central government made dengue a notifiable disease. This means that any confirmed or suspected case of dengue, as per the set parameters, should be reported to the district health authority. This rule applies to both public and private practitioners.

Zakir Naik Speeches Pro-Terror, IRF Paid Money To Lure Youth For Conversion: Mumbai Police

By NEWS KING | INNLIVE

No member of the IRF or any other NGO run by Naik was questioned.

In a 71-page report on controversial televangelist Dr Zakir Naik, the Mumbai Police have said his Islamic Research Foundation (IRF) paid anything between Rs 25,000 and Rs 50,000 to lure a youth to convert to Islam.

Spotlight: More Than 10,000 Indian Companies Have Defaulted On 'Provident Fund' Payments

By M H AHSSAN | INNLIVE

The numbers of defaulting companies and institutions is growing.

It should have taken 30 days for Sanjaya Kumar, 27, from Odisha to withdraw his father’s provident fund of Rs 40,000, the post-employment rainy-day or retirement stash that companies must compulsorily deduct from salaries.

In Their Search For Pure Islam, Many Muslim Sects Consider Others 'Insufficient' Or 'Infidels'

By NEWSCOP | INNLIVE

One of the key reasons why Muslim societies are in ferment concerns a theological tradition practiced by Islamic clerics to declare other Muslims as munafiqeen (hypocrites), kafir (infidels), or simply insufficient Muslims.

On 5 August, the Mumbai-based Urdu daily Roznama Inquilabpublished a report on its frontpage raising alarm that Qadianis have been included in the 2011 census report as Muslims.

Superstar Salman Khan - The 'Last Sultan' Of India

By NISHI KHAN | INNLIVE

The man, the mind and the mayhem. Up close with Hindi cinema’s biggest star ever made.

Outside a large vanity van that casts a soft light upon its owner whenever it is opened, like a refrigerator in a dark room, Salman Khan sits under a temporary structure made of poles and tarpaulin sheets, across a table with several white plastic chairs. He sits at a slight elevation—two chairs stacked one atop the other—as if to distinguish his position from those who come to occupy the other chairs.

Spotlight: Should Hospitals Give Patients 'Unbanked Blood' To Save Lives?.

By MITHILESH MISHRA | INNLIVE

Unbanked blood transfusion is illegal. But short of blood, rural hospitals in Chhattisgarh say it is not unethical.

In April, a woman walked into a hospital in Baitalpur in Bilaspur district of Chhattisgarh, bleeding heavily. She was in her thirties, and had ruptured her uterus while delivering a baby at home in a nearby village. She needed urgent medical attention. When a van dropped her off on the highway, she trudged two kilometres to Baitalpur's Evangelical Mission Hospital – only to be turned away.

The hospital had an operation theatre and a gynaecologist, but no blood.

With buses plying only once in two-three hours from Baitalpur to Bilaspur, the district headquarters, getting blood from the blood bank takes at least four to five hours, if not a day. Without a quicker way to access blood, the hospital is not equipped to handle an emergency.

“She had a ruptured uterus and was anaemic," said Dr Kusum Masih, the medical superintendent of the hospital who is also a gynaecologist. "We could not operate without blood."

The doctors sent her to Bilaspur about 35 km away – but she died on her way there.

Eleven districts with no blood banks
There are 16 blood government-run blood banks and 30 private ones across 27 districts of Chhattisgarh.

The deficit of blood in the state is about 48%, said Dr SK Binjhwar, from the State Blood Transfusion Council. According to the World Health Organisation, a country should have a stock of blood equivalent to 1% of its population. By this standard, Chhattisgarh alone needs 25 lakh units of blood at any given point – but it usually collects 16 lakhs units a year.

What's more, 11 out of 27 districts in Chhattisgarh do not have blood banks – the largest deficit in any state in the country. In all, there are 81 districts in the country without blood blanks, according to data from the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Most of them are concentrated in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and the North East.

For Chhattisgarh, a state with very high rates of anaemia, especially among women and children, the shortage of blood throws up multiple challenges.

According to the National Family Health Survey, more than half of the women of the state – about 57% – suffer from anaemia, as do nearly three-quarters, or 71.2% of children aged 0-5. About 2% of both women and children have severe anaemia, with a haemoglobin level below seven grams per decilitre of blood, for which most patients need blood transfusions.

Apart from this, about 60,000 children are estimated to have sickle cell anaemia, a severe form of the condition caused by a genetic blood disorder.

Anaemic women additionally face a higher risk of postpartum haemorrhage, which is a leading cause of maternal mortality in India. The maternal mortality rate of Chhattisgarh is 230 deaths for every 1,00,000 live births, as compared to the national average of 178.

Unbanked blood
For a rural hospital in Chhattisgarh, there is just one option in case of emergencies where blood is required – to refer a patient to a bigger facility. This often means that the person reaches the hospital in a critical condition, or dies on the way, as in the Baitalpur case.

Some hospitals are countering this by opting for an illegal way of giving blood, called unbanked direct blood transfusion. Under this, the blood of a willing donor’s that matches with the recipient’s group is collected, tested for infection with a rapid blood kit and then transfused without roping in a blood bank.

Take the case of a 40-year old woman from Shahdol district in Madhya Pradesh, who had been having extremely painful menstrual bleeding for nearly four months.

“Khoon girat rahe [I was bleeding all the time],” she said. “But, I would still have to work in our fields. How can I stop?” She was also not able to eat or walk and had severe chest pain.

On June 28, she somehow made it to a rural hospital in Chhattisgarh, which shares a border with Madhya Pradesh, travelling more than 200 km by train and bus with her husband and son.

When the doctors examined her blood, they saw she had a haemoglobin count of 4.6 – the normal range for women is between 12.1 and 15.1 – which meant she needed immediate transfusion. She also required an abdominal hysterectomy, as she had a large fibroid in her uterus.

In all, she needed three units of blood.

“I do not know how she managed to travel so far,” said a doctor at the hospital. “There is barely any oxygen reaching the organs. We have patients coming in with haemoglobin count of one as well. We can't direct such patients to other hospitals as their condition is already critical.”

The names of the hospitals and the doctors have been withheld because it is illegal to get blood from any other establishment other than a blood bank.

In this case, her son gave one unit of blood through unbanked direct blood transfusion, while two other units were arranged legally.

Doctors have been arrested in the past for using unbanked blood in other states.

Hospitals that practice unbanked blood transfusion usually have a list of donors in the community who can come and give blood when required. These donors are usually not paid – unless they demand payment and the situation is dire.

Insufficient blood
In 1996, the Supreme Court outlawed professional blood donation – that is, donating blood for money – and ordered the establishment of National Blood Transfusion Council to oversee and strengthen policies and systems governing blood transfusion in the country. In 1998, unbanked directed blood transfusion was disallowed.

In 2002, the council allowed the setting up of blood storage centres that were allowed to keep blood from licensed blood banks (but were not authorised to collect it). These storage centres could come up in villages and towns, while the mother blood banks would usually be in the district headquarters or cities.

In Chhattisgarh, there are 60 such storage units, mostly in community health centres, many of which do not use the blood at all and direct patients to go to other healthcare facilities. For instance, the community health centre in Gaurella, attached to the Chhattisgarh Institute of Medical Sciences in Bilaspur, has never approached the storage unit for blood. “I am not even sure it [the centre] functions,” said Dr VP Singh, who is in charge of the blood storage centre in the Bilaspur college.

Patients from community health centres often make their way to Jan Swasthya Sahyog, a non-profit in Ganiyari, near Bilaspur city. “Often, we see patients who are bleeding copiously after childbirth and are referred to us in that condition,” said Dr Yogesh Jain, one of the founders of the hospital.

Even hospitals that do use blood storage units, such as Jan Swasthya Sahyog, Shaheed Hospital in Dalli Rajahara in Chhattisgarh's Balod district and the mission hospitals, said they get insufficient units of blood.

“Our storage centre is attached to a mother blood bank in Durg,” said Dr Saibal Jana, chief physician of Shaheed Hospital. “We need about 150 units per month, but have barely about 35 units from the bank. Last month, they gave us only 10.”

Jan Swasthya Sahyog has an understanding with a private blood bank in the city, which gives them blood nearing its expiry date for free. This they use for scheduled surgeries, when the blood requirement is known.

Replacement donation
For every unit of blood taken from the bank, hospitals are supposed to send a replacement donor to the mother blood bank. This unwritten rule holds true even for hospitals that send relatives of patients to collect blood from a blood bank – private or public – for a planned surgery.

This is against the country’s National Blood Policy, which prohibits coercion in enlisting replacement donors and aims to phase replacement donations out.

Dr SK Binjhwar, from the State Blood Transfusion Council in Chhattisgarh, said that the state has 80% voluntary donation. Public health activists, however, said this figure is highly debatable and that more than 99% of the blood is likely collected through replacement donation.

“A hospital that has a blood storage unit organises blood donations camps for mother blood banks,” said Bhinjwar. “This is enough to meet the demands of the districts.”

The demand for a replacement donor for the mother blood bank hangs like a sword over the heads of patients’ family members.

Many donors from the hinterlands are not willing to travel to the nearest blood bank in the city to replace blood. It’s also difficult to find eligible donors in the immediate family – if a patient has anaemia, it’s likely that members of her family would also suffer from the condition.

Many also have an apprehension towards donating blood, fearing it causes weakness.

In such a scenario, touts who can provide ready donors for a price thrive. There are many such businesses in operation near blood banks in the state that provide donors for a sum of money to provide replacement units to the banks.

Rajesh Sharma, who runs the laboratory in Jan Swasthya Sahyog said that touts realise that people are looking for donors for replacement donation when they see an icebox in their hands. To combat this, Jan Swasthya Sahyog sends a patient's relative for replacement donation, they now send a letter (pictured below) that has to be signed by the blood bank.

People who are unaware about the dangers of remunerative blood donation – which has higher chances of infection – are willing to pay for the blood, despite having meagre resources.

In a rural hospital in Chhattisgarh, a 76-year-old was diagnosed with nectrotising fasciitis – a severe bacterial skin infection that spreads to the tissues quickly – on her arm. She had to be operated upon immediately to remove the infected tissues, but her haemoglobin count was just 6.3. During the surgery, the hospital collected blood via unbanked direct blood transfusion. But they were short of one unit.

“I do not know who will donate now...can we buy the blood?,” asked her daughter, who was tending to her.

While admitting that most units of blood are given only after a replacement donation, Dr Singh from the Bilaspur college's blood storage unit said: “We give blood to people who do not have replacements too."

"Usually if someone is an orphan with no family support, or someone comes without attendants, we give the bank without exchange too (referring to replacement donation)," he added.

Dr Singh said he had instituted a rule that no sickle-cell patients should be asked for replacement donors as he found out that the patients' families were bringing in professional donors, especially when the patient needed immediate treatment.

Unbanked blood ethical?
In a scenario where lack of access to blood banks has resulted in deaths that could have been avoided and helped touts flourish, doctors and healthcare activists practicing in rural areas have pushed for unbanked direct blood transfusion to be legalised, even as other activists argue that it shouldn't.

In June, Dr Yogesh Jain and Dr Raman Kataria from Jan Swasthya Sahyog wrotein favour of the practice in Indian Journal of Medical Ethics. They said that unbanked directed blood transfusion, if done by trained and certified healthcare teams, meets ethical standards and helps fulfil emergency blood requirements in rural areas.

In 2014, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare met a delegation from the Association of Rural Physicians that sought to legalise this practice. Though the Drug Technical Advisory Board considered the proposal, it was eventually rejected.

The delegation argued that there the Drugs and Cosmetics Act allows unbanked directed blood transfusion for Armed Forces in border areas and peripheral hospitals, which should be extended to the same in emergency situations in rural areas too.

The Drug Technical Advisory Board, however, said that testing of safe blood requires a lot of infrastructure and trained manpower, without which the blood is likely to be infected. Besides, they said, it would be difficult to monitor them. They also said that the exemption given to Armed Forces cannot be given to rural hospitals.

“Are soldiers' life more important than a woman giving birth?" asked Dr Jain. "The implication of this policy is that either people go to the cities for treatment, or choose to die wherever they are. People who have to handle emergencies have to be equipped with technology and regulations should look into the ethical requirement of safe blood.”

An ideal solution, said doctors, would be to increase blood availability in the country by having a central blood bank in each district, with well-equipped storage centres.

However, activists working towards ensuring voluntary blood donation said that unbanked direct blood donation should not be allowed.

“All hell will break loose," said Vinay Shetty, from Think Foundation, Mumbai and a member of Voluntary Blood Donation Committee of Maharashtra State Blood Transfusion Council. "There will be no control over the blood in this country and we will go back in time."

The state has to take responsibility for the shortage of blood and has to ensure that no bank is short of blood, he said.

“The only answer to this is blood sufficiency," said Shetty. "Organising blood is not the responsibility of the patient. It is the responsibility of society at large. This is happening because there is no value to human life. Somebody in the state has to take charge."

Eye Opener: The Unfortunate Enduring Saga Of Organ Sales In India

By M H AHSSAN | INNLIVE

A surgeon navigates the complex social and ethical arena in which illegal organ donations thrive.

Back in 2004, in an editorial for theIndian Journal of Medical Ethics on a kidney transplant racket, I began by saying, "In our scandal-prone Indian public life, one scandal distinguishes itself by the amazing regularity with which it hits the headlines every few years.

Prespective: The Law’s Blindness To Teenage Sexual Consent Is Criminalising Young Boys

By Dr.SHELLY AHMED | INNLIVE

Those working in juvenile justice say they negotiate tricky issues related to consent, caste and parental pressure while dealing with juvenile rape cases.

Six months short of his 18th birthday, Aditya* met a 16-year-old girl from a neighbouring school. The two got into a relationship, but this did not sit well with the girl’s parents, according to Aditya’s mother.

Film Review: ‘Madaari’, A Common Man Saga Takes On The Epitome Of Reality!

By MUGGA SINGH | INNLIVE

India may top in corruption, but voices against it have been dime a dozen, and cinema has ever so often projected a rebellious shriek against the misdemeanors of the state.

Films like Dombivli Fast (remade in Tamil as Evano Oruvan/Someone) and A Wednesday (also remade in Tamil asUnnaipol Oruvan/Someone Like You) have shown us how the common man when driven to the desperate drop-off takes on the Goliath of a state. While Nishikanth Kamat’s Dombivli Fast uses violence to make its point, Neeraj Pandey’s A Wednesday applies a largely cerebral format to focus on the angst of a man living in times of terror.

Women Celebrities In India: Redefining The Concept Of 'Motherhood'

By AMRUTA MUKHERJEE | INNLIVE

Tennis ace Sania Mirza recently said it does not matter how many Wimbledons she wins, it would be her motherhood that would define her as a woman. Bollywood celebs Kareena Kapoor and Aishwarya Rai have also faced the brunt of media speculation about their pregnancy. But these strong women are sending out their messages loud and clear,  let's peep into the topic to explore...

Variety Street Food: Taste Of Mumbai — Pizza, Dosa Or Both?

By ANUSHA RAI | INNLIVE

Call it the crispy Indian-style pancake. Dosa is a staple South Indian dish made of fermented rice batter. It’s topped with onions, mashed and seasoned potatoes or chili powder.

While the stomachic debate these days is about whether to go for traditional food such as the Indian dosa or the fast-cooked pizza, a street vendor in Mumbai is offering the best of both worlds.

Telangana Medical Exam Paper Leak Points At Corruption In TRS Govt

By LIKHAVEER | INNLIVE

`Dear, you have been shrtlstd for MBBS counselling in govt/Private medical colleges of Europe/Ukraine, No donation. For appointment call: 80107xxxxx'.

This was an innocuous SMS that landed in the inbox of several students appearing for the medical exam entrance test (EAMCET) in Telangana. This was followed by a phone call from a woman who claimed to represent a consultancy firm.

Satire: Mumbai Policeman Inspecting Zakir Naik Videos Becomes Radicalized

By PAAGAL PATRKAAR | INNLIVE

A policeman from the city who was given the task of inspecting Zakir Naik videos has ended up getting radicalized, as per the reports from NIA.

National Investigation Agency (NIA) has reportedly nabbed Shivaram Dhokle, a 27-year old policeman outside the airport today morning. Expressing his shock to the media, NIA chief said, “This must be the most shocking news that I had to share with you. The person who has been nabbed today by us is actually, a policemen from Mumbai.