'People are entitled to full respect for their opinions. But before I live with others, I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.'

That's what Atticus tells his daughter Scout in Harper Lee's 'To Kill A Mockingbird',  when she questions his decision to defend a black man against the opinion of practically everyone in the town they live in.  It's my favourite quote and it's from one of my most favourite books — which is celebrating its golden jubilee today. The book was first published exactly fifty years to the date on July 11th, 1960 and has never gone out of print since then. The Pulitzer Prize-winning 'To Kill a Mockingbird' has been translated into 40 languages and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Gregory Peck in 1965. The novel also constantly figures on almost every poll of favourite books, rated by both readers and scholars across the world.

With the United States in the midst

I discovered Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird' very late — in fact, I'd read two books inspired by it, and its author, before I went looking for it.

Today, it remains only one of two books that I reread soon after I finished reading it for the first time — the other being A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly.

Of all genres of fiction, stories that tell of a search for truth and justice are my favourites, courtroom dramas being closest to my heart. My first brush with adult fiction was John Grisham's 'A Time to Kill' — a book I've read 12 times at last count, at a rough average of once every two years since I first read it. Grisham has acknowledged Harper Lee's novel as one of the influences for 'A Time to Kill' — the story of a black father avenging his 11-year-old daughter's brutal rape by taking law into his own hands and killing the two rednecks responsible in cold blood and then being successfully defended by a white man deserves another post, so I'll leave it be

The other day as I was browsing through channels, I stumbled upon the heartrending story of Aruna Shanbaug, a nurse who has been lying unconscious in a vegetative state for the last 36 years at Mumbai's King Edward Memorial Hospital.

Aruna Shanbaug who worked as a nurse was sodomized and strangulated with a dog chain on the hospital premises by a ward boy on November 27, 1973. The brutal attack had sent her into a coma from which she never recovered. The asphyxiation cut off the oxygen supply to her brain. As a result, she has become cortically blind — her eyes can see but her brain does not register the images.

She is now brain-dead. She cannot speak, hear or see; and she is force-fed everyday. Doctors who have been attending to her say that there is no hope of her recovery. What is more shocking, is that her assailant is roaming free after serving his term and continues to work as a ward boy in another city.

Pinki Virani, a journalist by profession, who followed Aruna

Over the past six months there have been days when the world has seen faced terror attacks, natural calamities, and the pointless strife between people. But there have also been days when we've looked at the world and were happy to be a part of it.

Some of us spend our lives, not just for thinking about ourselves but by helping others. Here are some heroes who, in the face of adversity, saw opportunity. By their achievements, they make the rest of us wish we were a little like them.

Would a cobbler have ever thought that his son will one day crack one of the toughest entrance exams in the country and secure a place in one of the country's most coveted institutions? Not very likely. But that's just what happened. Abhishek Kumar Bhartiya's father is a cobbler, earning a daily wage of Rs 60. So having his son rank 154th out of over ten thousand students writing the IIT-JEE is no mean feat. "We have just one small room where six of us live and that too without electricity. So,