As we celebrate our 80th Independence Day, we reminisce many milestones achieved in science, technology, development, infrastructure, but there are some societal bottlenecks that still continue to cripple our minds. Talking of women in our country, they are resorting, increasingly, to the weapon they know cannot fail them – the freedom to say No. You don’t need a feminist to tell you why the language of abuse predominantly revolves around the abuse of women. What, then, are a woman’s options in today’s hugely unequal and very violent world, asks Editor-in-Chief Jyoti Malhotra in her weekly column (The Great Game) article The freedom to say No. It is to support all the women you know in breaking all the barricades and glass ceilings in the refashioning of a more just society, she says. Be witness to this change, not just today on Independence Day, but every day of the year. So that even when one of these women calls out an intimate perpetrator and says, ‘No means no,’ she knows you have her back.Tarun Tejpal, former Tehelka editor, was convicted of rape in a 2013 case. Two minutes in a lift. Two storeys of a hotel. Two stories, hers and his, each told with conviction, each carrying a life within it. One court found the first story unproved. Another found it proved beyond reasonable doubt, on the same record. The trial judgment was not spotless, but here is where the High Court appears to have gone wrong — it treated the trial court’s bad reasoning as licence to discard its good reasoning, writes Supreme Court senior advocate Sanjay Hegde in his Op-Ed article Two minutes, two storeys, two stories.These past few days, Parliament debated education with unusual seriousness. Suppose every examination became honest tomorrow. Every leak stopped, every corrupt official gone, every result pure merit. Would opportunity then be equal? Asks Lt Gen SS Mehta (retd), founder Trustee, Pune International Centre in his Edit article In repairing the lock we forgot the room. This is not an administrative fault. It is a philosophical inheritance — Macaulay wrote his Minute on Indian Education and sought to create a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour but English in taste. Vivekananda presented a different conception of man to the world. He would define education as “the manifestation of the perfection already in man”. India kept Macaulay and quoted Vivekananda, which is the most Indian compromise of all, he writes, presenting his argument.In part II of his article, The room: Fourth layer of the India Stack, he writes India has not failed to issue certificates. It has failed to make them worth anything. India’s difficulty is not that it lacks certifiers; it is that the certifiers it has command no trust.The government’s decision to change the jersey colour of the Indian Hockey team to saffron hasn’t gone down well with many. The jersey is almost a deity, worshipped by millions and worn by only a privileged few. Only a hundred-odd players in the history of our national sport get to pull it on, writes Jattvibedeep Misra, Editor, athleticsindia.com in his Op-ed article Hockey India’s saffron shift misses the goal.  So, where did Hockey India go wrong? It is surprising that HI chairman Dilip Tirkey didn’t see the storm coming, or worse, agreed that saffron was fine. The larger issue is that a national jersey change requires clearance from the Sports Ministry, the Sports Authority of India and, crucially, the fans. None of that happened.The events of the last two months in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) — protests by local residents, the brutal violence unleashed on them by the Pakistani security forces and a flawed election  —  have exposed the widening gulf between the people of the region and the authorities ruling over them.  People living there are coming to terms with the painful reality that they are no longer special, writes independent journalist Nirupama Subramanian in her Edit article PoK turmoil rattles Pak rulers. The hatred for the Pakistani establishment that rules over PoK seems to be as strong as, if not stronger than, what Kashmiris feel towards the Indian establishment. By dragging its feet on the restoration of statehood to J&K, the Indian leadership risks being as much out of step with the people as the Pakistani leadership is on its own side, she writes.Coming to the North-East, the region has the last remaining dense and virgin forests in India, and now these are falling prey to unrelenting destruction through commercial exploitation. Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Manipur and Tripura are in a race to hand over large tracts of land to private contractors to grow oil palm and manufacture palm oil, replacing relatively expensive imports writes former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran in his Edit piece North-East forests under siege. Traditionally, oil palm acreage is largely concentrated in the southern states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. The Forest Survey of India defines a forest as an acreage of at least 1 ha with a tree density of 10/ha and with a tree size of at least 2 metres on maturity. This covers orchards, bamboo and oil palm plantations, which would not normally fall in the category of forest. This is what enables the State to pass off an oil palm plantation as “no change in land use” and “no loss of forest”, he argues.A Supreme Court ruling in 1996 protected forests on tribal and community land by bringing them under India’s forest conservation laws. The court held that all forests that match the dictionary definition of “forest” are entitled to protection by the State. It is this ruling which is being sought to be changed by the amendment of 2021, since most of the forests in the North-East do not figure as such in official records. They do not qualify as “forest” at all. It is through this unseemly sleight of hand that the oil palm story in the region has taken wing, he avers.