There was something—deeply etched in me—that made me dislike Arundhati Roy. For a very long time. Not that I read something she wrote and found it objectionable, but because I had learnt, almost ...

Today, the incel culture has permeated across societies. If one goes back a decade or two, in the late 1990s, it was Alana, a nerdy queer woman, who coined the term ‘invcel’, that is, ‘involuntary ...

For more than two years now, first as a research assistant on a project and later for my own PhD project, I have travelled to the Prime Ministers Museum and Library (earlier known as the Nehru ...

Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, published in South Korea in 2007 and translated into English by Deborah Smith in 2015, begins as follows: “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I had always thought of ...

Devika Rege’s debut novel, Quarterlife, published in 2023, explores the fraught political realities in India after the emergence of the right-wing nationalist party, which rose to power in 2014. The ...

In recent days, I have been reading essays on Mahatma Gandhi, an architect of the national independence of India from British colonial rule. One among them is Akeel Bilgrami on ‘Gandhi as Philosopher’ ...

Banu Mushtaq’s 2025 International Booker Prize-acclaimed anthology “Heart Lamp” narrates the stories of Muslim women in their joys, sorrows, struggles, miseries, and all things in between. Mushtaq is ...

Dinjith Ayyathan’s ‘Kishkindha Kaandam’, a 2024 Malayalam thriller, enmeshes emotions, familial relations, and mystery in his storytelling. Monikered after Ramayana’s Kishkindha Kaandam, where Lord ...

In every neighbourhood, there are detectives and the supposed mysterious characters. Every family holds that one character who tends to get sceptical of everything and does not and will not accept ...

The birth of a new nation-state at the end of British colonial rule enabled sovereignty to be restored to the people for the first time in its history. People, who were, until then, mere subjects, ...

Kitchen—one place in Indian households delineated as a space for women. Men, by free will or forced socialisation into patriarchy, are placed far away from all spaces near the great Indian kitchen.

I recently went with a friend to the cinema to watch ‘Conclave’. I thoroughly enjoyed both the cinematic experience, the frames and the colours in the movie. Until watching this movie, I did not truly ...