Now that food apps can deliver lunch faster than it takes us to cross the road, and all the bars seem to have broken the button that reduces the volume of music, leaving the house has become too much of a task. Going out is no longer worth it.

While the doctors’ protest in Bengal has highlighted the abuse faced by medical professionals, the rest of India’s service industry is also wounded on a daily basis by the gruffness of the average Indian client — a species that prides itself on its lack of respect for the provider.

CM Mamata Banerjee and resident doctors at Kolkata’s NRS Hospital are locked in a standoff. While the country’s medical services are stretched thin over a nationwide strike of doctors, it is important to understand why violence against medical professionals is spiking in India.

One can understand our need to condemn the murder of a three-year-old girl in Aligarh. What is indefensible though, is the readiness of a group of individuals to use a national tragedy as an opportunity to hawk hatred among an already emotionally volatile public. It’s almost as if the victim doesn’t matter. All that matters is inciting hostility in the name of religion.

I wasn’t born during Tamil Nadu’s anti-Hindi agitation in the ’60s, but I do know enough to say the imposition was a source of vexation for my grandparents, my parents, and now me. The knowledge of Hindi has always been equated with national pride. And efforts to make the language mandatory once again, accords it a ranking above all other regional languages.

Students from marginalised communities come to cities like Mumbai with the hope that these are places filled with open-minded people free of prejudice. But Dr Payal Tadvi’s suicide brings to light the struggles of students from SC/ST categories in our educational institutions, where reservation is a pejorative word.

The #MeToo campaign’s biggest achievement has been to educate men in the magnitude of abuse and harassment that women face, something that should have been obvious to men all along. Will this tale have a happily-ever-after?

When women attempt to name and shame their aggressors, they are asked to follow due process. When they do follow due process, as the former Supreme Court staffer did in a detailed affidavit on allegations against CJI Ranjan Gogoi, the process is long and tortuous. As most women know, due process is code for being on trial themselves.

Men exercise power in sexual harassment cases not by fighting the charges levelled at them, but through counter-charges that invalidate complaints made against them. Only days after the allegation against Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi by an ex-SC staffer, there was a parallel discussion on how he had been framed as a part of a larger conspiracy to “deactivate” the CJI’s office.

Generations after the British packed up and left, we continue to swoon over a British accent, dream of watching a cricket match at Lord’s, and consider Colin Firth as a legit avatar of Mr Darcy. A fair bit of the English-speaking urban Indian population are embarrassingly obsessed with the United Kingdom and its royal family.