Tushar Mangl

This is the story of Harpreet Kaur. A girl from a small town in Punjab who probably had a lot of dreams like all young people have. 7th of December, 2013 was supposed to be a big day for the 22 year old. She was getting married. But at around 9 in the morning when she was being readied for the big moment at an upmarket beauty salon in Ludhiana, a boy masked with a handkerchief barged into the salon and spilled acid on her. Before running away he dropped a note which spoke about a love affair that never materialized. Everyone naturally thought that it was a jilted lover who did it. People have known to commit worse things for love. But not the mother of the victim. She suspected a woman relative from the groom's side. Indeed it happened to be true. The woman was the groom's brother's divorced wife who out of spite wanted to ruin the wedding. So what does she do? She cooks up this conspiracy along with her paramour and some hired goons to throw acid on the young girl so a...

In the year 2011, a movement was launched for a jan lokpal by activist Anna Hazare. We all know about it. Many of us especially born in the late 80s or early 90s were quite fascinated by the sheer energy of the movement. Our parents might have had seen another high voltage movement by Jai Prakash Narayan in the 70s but for us, this was our very first large social movement. Add the high density exposure of social as well as television and it was all very good. We have read about the JP movement and it was already clear that even though the two movements could not be compared but they both were similar in the sense, they both caught the anger of the people against the governments of their times and channelized it into their movements. Hence, it was clear that like in JP era, here also, politicians would be produced. A large part of the present leadership in India from Nitish Kumar to Arun Jaitley is a product of the JP movement. From the Anna movement came Arvind Kejriwal a former I...