Mumbai: How could you define Rishi Kapoor? A sparkling Kapoor prodigy, a versatile actor who explored different genres till cancer grips him, a sharp tongue who used to call ‘spade’ a ‘spade’? The second son of Raj Kapoor was an absolute chocolate boy during his initial days and used to enjoy female attention a lot.
But as soon as he fell for his on-screen co-star Neetu Kapoor, a love story was born and continued till his last breath. Ahead of his third death anniversary, let’s remember the gorgeous Kapoor in vignettes of his family ties.
“Fond memories of Baisakhi day as we got engaged 43 years back on 13th April 1979. Baisakhi has a different connotation for Neetu and Rishi.”
In this frame, Rishi Kapoor is holding his granddaughter Samara Sahani.
This is the ultimate famjam picture. Rishi was accompanied by Neetu, son Ranbir, daughter Ridhima and granddaughter Samara.
Neetu Singh’s Instagram album is full of couple pictures. From the 70s to 2020s- the couple has seen different shades of marital life. This is a goofy picture where Neetu and Rishi exude love.
This is a major throwback picture where Rishi is enjoying the colour of festival.
This is a precious frame. In Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt’s Sangeet, Ranbir is holding a picture frame of his late father.
This is another famjam moment where Kapoor was accompanied by his teenage son and daughter.
If stories are to be believed, after being diagnosed with cancer, Rishi requested his doctor that he might allow him to have a sip of wine once a day.
Food, fun, family and wine…This was Rishi Kapoor’s world…
New Delhi: While hearing a batch of petitions seeking legal sanction to same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court on Tuesday orally observed that there is no absolute concept of a man or a woman and it cannot be only about the genitals, rather it is far more complex.
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, representing the Centre, submitted before a five-judge bench headed by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud that there is a legislative intent that a marriage can only happen between a biological man and a biological woman, including Special Marriage Act.
Chief Justice Chandrachud told Mehta, “Very important judgement you are making. That very notion of a biological man is absolute and the notion of biological woman is also absolute…” Mehta said a biological man is a biological man and it is not a notion.
The Chief Justice said, “There is no absolute concept of a man or a woman at all…it cannot be the definition of what your genitals are, it is far more complex. Even when the Special Marriage Act (SMA) says man and woman, the very notion of a man and notion of a woman is not an absolute, based on what genitals you have….”
During the hearing, Mehta stressed that his preliminary objections against the maintainability of the petitions seeking same-sex marriage should be decided first and added that all states should be issued notices before a decision is made by the top court.
Mehta submitted that the institution of marriage affects personal laws. The Hindu Marriage Act is a codified personal law and Islam has their own personal law, and part of them is not codified. The bench – comprising justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul, S. Ravindra Bhat, Hima Kohli, and P.S. Narasimha – replied that it is not getting into personal laws.
Senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, representing one of the petitioners seeking recognition of same-sex marriage, submitted that his clients seek a declaration that “we have a right to get married.” The counsel said the state will recognise that right under the Special Marriage Act and the marriage will be recognised by the state after the declaration of this court.
Rohatgi contended that this is because even now we are stigmatised, and this is even after the Article 377 judgment, and that the Special Marriage Act should mention ‘spouse’ instead of man and women.
Senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, appearing for one of the parties in the matter opposing same-sex marriages, argued that marriage between man and woman is not a gift of law, but existed since time immemorial and marriages are necessary to perpetuate the human race itself. Dwivedi contended that even SMA has provisions reflective of personal laws and talks about different marriageable age for a man and a woman. How would one reconcile with these (who is man and who is woman)?
Senior advocate Kapil Sibal submitted that he is all for such relationships but is concerned about the societal severe consequences, which may follow after declaration and questioned, what happens if they adopt a child and later want to separate? Who gets maintenance?
Sibal stressed that if piecemeal arrangement is done then it will create more complications, which will hurt the community and in other countries where same-sex marriages were recognised, they overhauled the entire legal framework.
The arguments in the matter will continue after 2 p.m. The Centre has told the Supreme Court that the demand for same-sex marriage is a “mere urban elitist views for the purpose of social acceptance,” and recognising the right of same-sex marriage would mean a virtual judicial rewriting of an entire branch of law.
The Centre’s response came on a batch of petitions challenging certain provisions of the Hindu Marriage Act, Foreign Marriage Act and the Special Marriage Act and other marriage laws as unconstitutional on the ground that they deny same-sex couples the right to marry or alternatively to read these provisions broadly so as to include same-sex marriage.
New Delhi: A high-level Parliamentary panel has asked the government to broadly define the term “fake news” and has also sought its response on the need for various fact-checking units (FCUs) in the country.
Noting that “fake news” is becoming a disturbing trend in the country, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communication and Information Technology has disapproved of the government’s silence on the matter.
The comments from the panel have come just days after the government decided to extend the timeline for consultations of its plan to take down information which is marked as “fake” by the FCUs of the Press Information Bureau (PIB) of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
The extension came amid protests from all quarters against the move.
The Parliamentary panel’s observations have been made in its action taken report on “Ethical Standards in Media Coverage”, submitted in Parliament by the panel last week during the Budget session.
In the light of false or fake news becoming a disturbing trend in India, the committee has also sought to know from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, whether it intends to have such FCUs for countering misinformation in general.
The panel has also expressed its disappointment over the ministry’s silence on its earlier recommendation of using latest technologies like Artificial Intelligence, considering existing expertise in non-government agencies and to study the anti-fake news laws of countries like Australia, Malaysia and other democracies for developing some legal provisions.
It noted that “the ministry’s reply is silent on all these aspects and they submitted merely the statutory and institutional mechanisms for preventing spread of fake news existing for print media, TV channels and digital news publishers”.
However in the light of rapid spread of fake news due to latest technologies and its impact on the citizens, the committee has recommended that “there is always a scope for learning from the expertise of non-government organisations in the field and for studying anti-fake news laws of other countries so as to have some legal provisions for curbing fake news in the country”.
It has thus asked the Ministry to provide action taken in this direction along with the initiatives taken for utilising latest technologies such as Artificial Intelligence for intervening and checking fake news in near real time.
If you want to solve a problem, it helps to be able to define it, but when it comes to a problem like China, western leaders have been struggling to find the right words.
Liz Truss sought to designate China as a “threat” to Britain, but did not stay prime minister long enough for that to become established policy. Her successor, Rishi Sunak, has opted for the less combative “systemic challenge” but he is under pressure from backbench MPs to follow Truss’s path and call Beijing a “strategic threat”.
Sunak has made clear he does not want the UK to be out of step with its allies on the issue, most importantly the US. In Washington, meanwhile, China designation is a delicate and evolving art.
The delicacy was apparent when a Chinese balloon sailed over the continental US earlier this month. The US declared the high-altitude airship and its payload to be designed for spying and shot it down once it was safely over the Atlantic. The secretary of state, Antony Blinken, cancelled a long-planned trip to Beijing to address bilateral tensions, but at the same time stressed that channels of communication would be kept open and that the US remained keen on a meeting when conditions allowed. Blinken may meet his counterpart, Wang Yi, as soon as this week, at the Munich security conference.
The theme of US-China policy towards the end of the Trump administration was an all-encompassing decoupling, in which China was presented in mostly adversarial terms. Joe Biden has preferred to talk about “stiff competition”. His administration’s national defence strategy paper deemed Russia to be an “acute threat” while China was portrayed as the US’s only long-term “competitor”. In recent weeks, the official catchphrase for Beijing has been the slightly nebulous “pacing challenge”, suggesting the US is the world’s constant frontrunner with China ever closer to its shoulder.
The problem with categorising China is that there are multiple aspects to its global role as it expands its presence on the world stage. For that reason, Democratic senator Chris Murphy has warned against digging up old cold war rhetoric.
“You can’t use the terminology that we used for our conflict with the Soviet Union for our conflict with China,” Murphy told Foreign Policy. “It is apples and oranges. We had virtually no trade relationship with the Soviet Union. Our most vital trade relationship is with China. So I do worry about a bunch of Cold Warriors and Cold War enthusiasts thinking that you can run a competition with China like you ran a competition with the Soviet Union. It’s not the same thing.”
Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on 11 January 2023. Beijing has cultivated relationships with African countries. Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock
With this in mind, Blinken has adopted a Swiss army penknife multi-tooled approach that is “competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be and adversarial when it must be.”
Washington is acutely aware that it has been complacent in its competition with China for global clout, having assumed that better US technology and its democratic model would win the day, only to find that African countries and other parts of the global south were sitting on their hands when the US called for support in the UN general assembly. Last year an old Pacific ally, Solomon Islands, signed a security pact with Beijing, denying entry to a US Coast Guard cutter not long after.
The Biden administration now plans to beef up its diplomatic presence in the Pacific, reopening some shuttered missions. It has set up a “China house” in the state department to coordinate analysis and help counter China’s message around the world. On Wednesday, the deputy secretary of state, Wendy Sherman, summed up the new US approach as Washington takes on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the contest for hearts and minds in emerging economies.
“It is not to say that the PRC can’t invest or that you should toss them out,” Sherman said at the Brookings Institution. Instead, she said the message will be: “Have your eyes wide open”.
“Understand what you’re getting, understand what rules apply, what the norms are. Give us a chance, see what we have to offer. Let us compete and help you develop as a country in the ways that you choose,” Sherman said.
As for collaboration with China, she said there was little choice other than to work with Beijing to address the climate emergency.
“There is no doubt that we cannot meet the climate challenge without engagement with the PRC,” Sherman said. “It’s just not possible because we are both such large emitters and historic emitters.”
At the same time, there are plenty of fields in which the US and China are adversaries. The balloon affair has just added another layer to a constant, escalating intelligence struggle between the two powers, in which Beijing has scored some remarkable successes in recent years, stealing designs for the F-35 fighter jet for example. Chinese hackers also stole the personal details of 22 million federal workers – current, former and prospective.
Fears of China’s technological capabilities led Biden to introduce draconian export restrictions on semiconductors in October of last year, in an effort to strangle China’s microchip sector. It came close to an economic declaration of war, but Republicans in Congress are still trying to depict him as “soft on China”, calling on him to ban the TikTok app as a threat to national security. Some red states are considering bans on Chinese nationals buying land.
It is in the military arena of course where the stakes are the highest and the risks of a competitive relationship becoming adversarial are greatest. Last week, the Pentagon informed Congress that China now had more missile silos than the US. It was an eye-catching claim, though most of the silos are empty and the US retains a substantial superiority in submarine and airborne launchers. China is estimated by the Federation of American Scientists to have 350 nuclear warheads. Even if that number tripled, as the Pentagon predicts it will, it will still be less than a fifth of the US stockpile.
China’s long-term threat will depend ultimately on whether it is developing its military clout simply to deter or to attack, across the Taiwan Strait in particular. At the end of January, the head of US Air Mobility Command, Gen Mike Minihan, told other officers that his “gut” told him the US and China would be at war by 2025. It was an estimate quickly disowned by the rest of the Pentagon leadership, who shied away from such expressions of inevitability.
US officials say that Xi Jinping is watching Russia’s military debacle in Ukraine with concern and maybe recalibrating his options. Opinions differ within the administration on how seriously Xi takes his pledge to reunite China, another reason it has wavered over the right terminology.
There is agreement for now however that repeatedly deeming China to be a threat risks making matters worse, shaping policy in such a way that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
