Dark windows on cars – violation of laws
I really wonder sometimes about whether we should blame the ordinary citizen or the police when you see laws and rules being broken so easily in the country. I was witness to something that left me wondering about this question. We see traffic rules normally broken very casually on the roads (speed limit, usage of helmets and seat belts, drunk driving, red lights, etc); most rules are broken very easily. The sad part is that most of us are guilty at some point about breaking these rules and later blaming the police for being inactive and not enforcing the rules.
I had gone to an car accessories shop for some seat covers, and witnessed a number of vehicles parked there (hogging a lot of space in the market, but that is a different story), and employees of the shop busy fixing dark film on the windows of the cars. Now, once many years back, when the police had ruled that the dark films are not allowed on car windows, I had been ordered by my parents to be the one to remove the dark film It was a painful process, and I had always hesitated after that to fix dark films because of this reason.
Categories: Citizen, Convenience, Law, Police, Traffic Tags:
Use RTI and get transferred as punishment
The RTI Act was supposed to provide an inexpensive way for people to get more empowered, and to be able to exercise their right to get more openness into the Government machinery. This would be a sword in the fight to expose corruption and mis-governance; and the RTI Act has brought about some changes in this regard. There have been many cases where people have used RTI to either get more information about cases where they have fighting with babudom; or there have been cases where people (and many organizations fighting for more openness) have used the power of the RTI Act to expose corruption or other such problems that used to remain hidden earlier.
However, this is not to say that the Government bureaucracy is not fighting back. There have been all sorts of attempts made to stone-wall queries, or to question as to why people need the information that they have requested. In some cases, these attempts to prevent disclosure of such information has lead to fines on the concerned officials. However, the method used below was something that I had not read of earlier, and seems to use normal Government channels to punish a Government employee trying to expose corruption:
Categories: Babudom, Corruption, Fraud, Governance, Information, Law, Madhya Pradesh, Punishment, Reform, RTI Tags:
Introducing medical mercy killing in India ?
A very sensitive subject indeed. Mercy killing, or allowing a person to take his own life (or a team of doctors to do so) is a dilemma that raises ethical questions all over the world. For a world that has derived many of its laws and regulations from religious backgrounds (Ten Commandments / The Gita / The Koran / etc..), mercy killing is something that raises the hackles of a large section of the world’s population. It is only permissible in some countries, and that too under strict control. In many other countries (even one such as the United States), mercy killing has run against a moral hard rock and many physicians have been sentenced for helping in carrying it out. In a recent case of Terry Schiavo (Wikipedia), the case went through major conflict, with people at all levels (politicians, religious figures, family rights groups, etc) getting involved.
The basic premise for mercy killing is simple: There are many medical conditions that are terminal, and there is no established medical treatments that can cure the disease or prevent death. And unlike movies, people don’t dance or sing till almost just before death, they go through horrible phases of steadily declining abilities – losing control of vital motor abilities, losing control of their mental faculties, unable to fend for themselves and being dependent on others, and a steadily increasing pain. In such cases, there has been the logic that given that their condition is terminal (that is, they have reached a condition where death is confirmed and they no longer have a life that seems meaningful in any way), they should be allowed an option to end their life when they still can command control of their life.
