Morning News (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo): September 3, 2009

Is it the same ‘to be just’ and ‘to prevent injustice’? Does justice have any meaning if it is not absolute/perfect but relative/comparative (at least, at any point of time)? To wake up with these thoughts is to get out on the wrong side of the bed. Like most bad dreams, it is a result of recent reading and to top that list would be Amartya Sen’s The Idea Of Justice (I have stopped after chapter one – I need to breathe and assimilate). What else?

Today, there is an article in the Hindu titled “Divorce can be granted even if consent is withdrawn: court”. It says:

“Writing the judgment, Justice Kabir cited Supreme Court judgments and said no purpose would be served by prolonging the agony of the parties to a marriage which had broken down irretrievably, and the curtain had to be rung down at some stage.”

I do not understand how the court works and recently I asked a few questions in a blog concerned with “prolonging the agony” and “the curtain had to be rung down at some stage”. I wanted to suggest that divorce should be made as easy as marriage – probably the number of cases in court might actually come down when people cannot use the judicial system to trouble and torture others.

For those laypersons like me, I did a Google search for Article 142 and came up with the following article (if you have other useful references, please do let me know).

On the global stage, there was the Lockerbie case (refer the Guardian’s page). One, I am totally against capital punishment and therefore, the culprit should be incarcerated till the day he is of no harm to society. If a person is a mass-murderer or Hannibal Lecter, when would that day be? Two, if the culprit is terminally ill, should he be shown compassion? What do we gain by keeping him in person – some sense of revenge or justice? Another tough one, right?

Then, there is Jaycee Dugard (now 29 years old) who was held captive for 18 years. How did a society allow that to happen? What failed? It is interesting to read a related article in the Economist titled “Sex laws: unjust and ineffective”.

On a lighter note, we have a head-hunting firm’s dispute with an investment bank (refer Times Online for details regarding this ‘David and Goliath’ fight). And, what kind of stakes are we talking about? Approximately, 90 million pounds only. There is something in the air which tells me that someone is going to get really rich soon.

An article in the Financial Express about the ASEAN FTA agreement suggests that Kerala should:

“…wake up to the global context from the present home market insularity and recognise the wider national and international economic imperatives.”

And I thought it was because people in Kerala ‘woke up’ that it is nearly impossible for a medium/small-scale farmer to harvest paddy or tap rubber due to shortage of feasible labour. With the cost of coconut picking rising (in the cities, it is about Rs 30 per coconut tree), I hear that people are looking forward to the coconut tree climbing robot. Of course, it might be sufficient if the farmers learned how to tap rubber, climb coconut trees and harvest paddy (if you know about training institutes, please do let me know).

Finally, there is the case of the Mashelkar report on patent law issues. Please read the article in the Business Standard (of course, if you have other useful references, please do let me know). The experts’ report seems to have quoted another expert to support their contention but unfortunately, the latter says that his views have been misinterpreted.

I still keep searching for news/columns that I want to read.