Policemen stand guard near the state secretariat anticipating protests following reports of two women of menstruating age entering the Sabarimala temple, one of the world's largest Hindu pilgrimage sites, in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India, Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2019. Two women on Wednesday entered one of India's largest Hindu pilgrimage sites that had been forbidden to females between the ages of 10 and 50, sparking protests across a southern state, with police firing tear gas at several places to break up stone-throwing protesters, police said.
Policemen stand guard near the state secretariat anticipating protests following reports of two women of menstruating age entering the Sabarimala temple, one of the world's largest Hindu pilgrimage sites, in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India, Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2019. Two women on Wednesday entered one of India's largest Hindu pilgrimage sites that had been forbidden to females between the ages of 10 and 50, sparking protests across a southern state, with police firing tear gas at several places to break up stone-throwing protesters, police said. Credit: AP PHOTO/R S Iyer

Kudos to columnists Prashad and Pasha

Thursday’s Gazette provided exceptionally exciting reading for me, and I’m guessing it did the same for a lot of other people. In particular, the opinion page is tremendous. Thank you for giving Vijay Prashad the space to relate the recent news of 5.5 million women forming a human wall across the state of Kerala, an event about which I had previously heard only a little — I lived in India in 2008 and try to stay in touch with what’s happening in that vast place — and for Shaheen Pasha’s superb, empathetic commentary on powerful Muslim women.

I also read with considerable interest the front-page article about the possibility of cannabis cafes coming to Massachusetts. Coincidentally, I just spent a week in Amsterdam, where, as some readers may already know, the word “coffeeshop” means a place where you can sit and smoke marijuana. There are hundreds of such places in that lively city, interspersed with excellent restaurants, boutiques, cheese shops and places where you can buy souvenirs ranging from miniature windmills to items too obscene to mention here. My wife and I were amused by a notice on the tables in the one coffee shop we visited — for coffee, actually — that reads, “Smoking weed is welcome here, but please do not smoke tobacco.”

You also managed to put on the front page some plain good news, namely the piece about enhanced access to Mt. Tom. 

And yes I read about the Patriots and Celtics as much as anybody else. In short: Bravo.

John Stifler
Florence