The Retarded Satirist

The strides in modern medicine have truly separated us from animals. We can provide limbs to our limbless, remove cancers from our diseased and everything in between. Yet, we hold ourselves back in some areas owing to our ethno-religious mores and moralities which on broad basis are beneficial but seem frighteningly disastrous on certain individual events. It is with this realization, we set out to codify our laws which broadly subscribe to our moralities while taking into account the specific requirements of special circumstances. The debate over medical termination of pregnancies is one such case where the pro-life and pro-choice camps have lobbied hard to sustain their belief systems even to the extent of radical and even perverse arguments giving lawmakers all over the world the arduous task of finding a suitable balance between the two. Balance can crudely be defined as the position that is equally not equitably acceptable to both camps while requiring both camps to forego some o...

In the pre-Bommai case era, when a national party won elections at the Centre, it consequently asked for the resignation of the state governments not aligned with its disposition. The Centre argued that the state governments had lost the mandate of the people. It was a classic case of a tussle between the the Federal and the Unitary structure of the government. Article 1 of the Indian Constitution says that - India i.e. Bharat is a union of states while the presence of a written constitution and the Seventh schedule cement the federal structure of our polity. After the Bommai case, this dissolution of state assemblies on losing power in the Centre came to an end thus adding teeth to the federal provisions of our polity. It was naively assumed that this would end the Centre-State friction and foster harmony in their relation. Sadly, this was not to be. The battleground had just changed its location. The governor, an appointee of the Centre and an integral part of the State Government ...

Germany as we see on the world map these days was not always of this shape. It was a part of the Holy Roman Empire which stretched from modern day Poland to Italy. The empire was founded by Charlemagne in the 9th Century AD( Encyclopedia Britannica Pg26) . Around 300 years after its formation, the empire went through an interregnum which was successfully ended by Rudolf the first of Germany. Due to the interregnum, there were multiple claimants to the throne apart from Rudolf himself, the most notable among them was named Ottokar. Rudolf got his coronation ratified by the then Pope and the Nuremberg Diet thereafter asked Ottokar to relinquish his claims, failing which, Rudolf defeated him in a series of battles and cemented his place as the Holy Roman Emperor. (Ingrao, Charles, The Habsburg Monarchy)  Throughout his reign, Rudolf was known to be indecisive and this was brought into the open by Dante's Divine Comedy where he is being made fun of by his contemporaries for not doing ...