作者： bharat.cn

An Indian Army officer and two soldiers were killed in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley on Monday night during “violent face off” with Chinese military, officials said. 

It is believed to be first such incident along the border with China that Indian armed forces personnel have been killed after a gap of nearly 45 years. Four Indian soldiers had lost their lives in an ambush at Tulung La in Arunachal Pradesh in 1975.

The violent face-off between Indian and Chinese military forces took place along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Ladakh region amid heightened tensions over the border dispute between the two countries.

Senior military officials of the two sides are holding a meeting in Galwan Valley to defuse tension.

Actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death has made people realise how mental health plays an important part in everyone’s life.  As the topic trends on social media, it has kickstarted a long-due conversation on mental health of actors in the film industry. 

Rajput’s battle with depression for the past six months and then his death have put the spotlight on the role of mental health care in lives of celebrities. Many personalities have spoken up since Sunday to underline that the society needs to take mental health as seriously as physical health and without waiting for a moment of crisis.

Many from the industry like Shruti Hassan, Priyanka Chopra, Mahesh Bhatt, and Deepika Padukone expressed their grief on social media handles and stressed on the importance of mental health.

Film director Mahesh Bhatt drew attention to the mental health crisis saying that the society has not equipped itself to deal with it. “This monumental tragedy that has hit the nation hard with the passing of Sushant screams out just one message. When it comes to the area of mental health we are not equipped to deal with the storm that will erupt right from the ground beneath our feet,” he said.

The pandemic has not been kind to Delhi. The state government, no stranger to pugilist moves in politics, is locked in a grim battle. Even since the lockdown was eased, horror stories have been escaping out of city hospitals like ghouls out to torment the populace. The city’s Covid graph is soaring; overloaded hospitals are turning away patients, letting them die without proper medical care. But what’s a crisis if not an opportunity for some extra lashings of mayhem?

We were not disappointed: two contentious decisions came along from chief minister Arvind Kejriwal to set off a right royal row. One was on barring admission to patients from outside Delhi to state-run hospitals. The order was sent back to the pavilion by the lieutenant-governor, Anil Baijal, before you could pronounce N95. The other was a revised testing strategy—that asymptomatic people will be restricted from testing. Again, the L-G scalped it, directing the state to adhere to guidelines set by ICMR. The soundness of the decisions—or the lack of it—in terms of ethics or effective epidemic policy is one thing. But the episode framed a central conflict at the heart of India’s Covid-19 battle—central being an accidental word there. The key question is: who owns an epidemic?

Kejriwal’s U-turn—from being a votary of aggressive testing to a subdued line—baffled all, and gave enough ammunition to the Centre to train its guns on the state. Not only because this was flip-flop—a pandemic is a dynamic flux, and policy needs to be alive rather than rigid. The real issue was whether a state could adopt its own strategy, in tune with its needs, but at variance with the broad national template. There are competing formal frameworks at play here. Health is a state subject under the Constitution. At the same time, a pandemic is a national event—indeed, global. Rich mig­rants courier in infection from abroad, poor migrants connect it to the last mile. It calls for national collaboration to solve it, a measure of uniformity in policy. But how much uniformity? And who examines the content of that policy for its soundness? Whose perspectives would feed it? Does it reflect India’s multiple experiential realities? Is it consultative enough? A restriction on autonomy at state level, essentially, creates the spectre of a monopoly in policymaking. In short, it seems to have fallen upon a tiny virus you cannot see to invoke another thing you cannot see much in India these days: a federal spirit.