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On Sernabatim beach
Photo: sean hill / Flickr I’m swimming halfway back to shore when I see her standing by the water’s edge. She’s pulling her pigtail and chewing her lip. I lift my body out of the saltwater and wipe the...
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Holes
Photo: guldem / Flickr There were six months and 12 days left for our wedding, when my scooter toppled into a pothole and a speeding truck dragged my fiancé, riding pillion, under its tyres. Today,...
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On tidying
Marie Kondo. Photo: konmarimethod / Facebook. My sixteen-year-old son, Roshan, stands in front of me holding up a white thermal vest. “Spark joy?” he asks. A few months ago, that would have been an odd...
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Scoping the bigger picture
A street child, or ‘tokai’ leads a procession during the mass uprising of 1969. Police bulletskilled the child soon after the photograph was taken by Rashid Talukder (Dhaka, 1969). Photograph courtesy:...
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A novel of thresholds
Fuelled by the nationalist movement in India, collaboration and team work emerged as the new zeitgeist of literature in the 1920s. The charged climate of the decade made writers conscious of the...
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Bigot makes me coffee
Adapted from photo by: Kristina Alexanderson / Flickr It is delicious. “The era of intellectual decisions is gone,” she says, the maker of the coffee, “we cannot afford it anymore.” It is wartime, it...
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Hussain Miyan’s last journey
A 16th-century Mughal miniature. Photo derived from: Christie’s. Water hyacinth covered half of the Yamuna. Mass of silt, debris and mud poked its nose, pushing back the water into a thinner stream....
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From ‘Mother India’ to ‘Mission Mangal’
From the poster of ‘Mission Mangal’ (2019) Jagan Shakti’s 2019 film Mission Mangal endorses a brand of theatrical nationalism meant to appeal to a nation – encouraged by a Prime Minister with a...
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Resurrecting a forgotten architect
From the left: Pablo Picasso, Minnette de Silva, Jo Davidson and Mulk Raj Anand at the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace. Photo: PAP/Wikimedia In 1946, in Bombay, a group of young...
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Performing politics
In his short life of 35 years, Bulbul Chowdhury spread not only the spirit of dance, but also a spirit of revolution. Bulbul Chowdhury was a Bengali Muslim dancer who rose to fame in the 1930s and was...
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