Nehru’s 130th birth anniversary marks the rare occasion where he isn’t being criticised by rivals of the Congress party. The last few years have seen Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru become the right wing’s favourite punching bag.

Children, irrespective of what a birth certificate claims, should be allowed to explore and own any gender role that they think fit. They should get to decide what they’re comfortable with before society imposes restrictions on what they can and cannot be.

I see a beggar limping toward our car and shut my eyes. My six-year-old shouts, “Mama! That man has only one arm and leg!” Then she asks me a dozen questions about how he survives and why we can’t help. I don’t remember the last time I felt like she did in that moment.

As underachieving DU students, jeering at JNU nutters took up most of our day. But the fee hike saga has sounded the death knell for our collective sense of humour.

India is saddled with an education system that is a vestige of Britain’s industrial revolution, which churns out efficient workers, not innovative thinkers. If analyses from UNICEF and NASSCOM are to be believed, the bulk of our graduates are unemployable. We’re a country desperately in need of education reforms.

It’s odd that the ongoing student protests against fee hikes in JNU are being viewed by most as an excuse for the students to sponge off the privileged taxpayer’s money. Especially in a country where qualifying for a tax slab is in itself a privilege that most would be happy to have.

There are a few occasions when I examine my faith. A faith kept alive by tenuous connections like my relationship with my grandfather, the last of the Sikhs who came from Pakistan and created lives out of nothing.

Growing up, we women have been repeatedly led to believe that our own sense of being lies at the lowest rung of the ladder; that we must respect and bow before everybody but ourselves. So what if a stranger elbowed my breast? I am not going to disrupt an entire auto line over it, right?

Solutions for Delhi’s (and any other city’s) pollution lies in new government policies and programmes – improved public transport, building cycle lanes, a well-thought out ban on plastic. Someone using one less firecracker during Diwali or cycling to work is not going to help.