Sonal

Book Review: Against White Feminism

In her new book, Rafia Zakaria argues that white feminists must revise their notions of equality ♦ This story was originally published in India Today. Among the statement clothing on display at this year’s Met Gala was a gown worn by US Representative Carolyn Maloney, in suffragette colours, festooned with sashes proclaiming ‘Equal Rights for …

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A Bird’s-Eye View of the Raj

Science and whimsy mix in Delhi Art Gallery’s exhibition of Company paintings. ♦ This story was originally published in India Today. For Major-General Thomas Hardwicke, it wasn’t enough to employ an artist to paint the birds he came across in India. The naturalist and British East India Company officer also ‘employed a shikari to shoot …

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Writing in Past Continuous

An interview with Sunjeev Sahota ♦ A version of this interview was originally published in India Today. By his own admission, British writer Sunjeev Sahota’s novels “tend to come down to a few brown people living in north England or India”. But within this framework, Sahota wove richly detailed lives and unique voices in his …

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Darkness in Delhi

As Delhi’s lives are looted again, the architecture of the city too shifts beneath our feet ♦ A version of this op-ed was originally published on The Quint, during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India. It is possible to miss a city while still living in it. Delhi in particular is subject …

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Links in the Food Chain

In Indranee Ghosh’s memoir, food becomes a metaphor for inclusion ♦ This story was originally published in India Today. In the introduction to her food memoir “placed in the east of India”, Indranee Ghosh astutely notes that when everything else has changed “what we as a family have not lost is the food we ateperhaps the only …

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Killing Snobbery Softly

Anuja Chauhan takes a stab at the murder mystery genre and skewers elitism in the process ♦ This story was originally published in India Today. It’s hard to say whether the characters in Anuja Chauhan’s five previous novels were as loathsome as the ones in her newest, Club You to Death, or whether elite Indian …

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Mixing it up

How Indian bartenders are taking a shot at entrepreneurship ♦ This story was originally published in India Today. Last April, Ajesh Joseph, head mixologist at Jetlag, Bengaluru, posted a video of himself zooming, literally, up and down a hallway, draped over a wheelie bin. It was captioned ‘Quarantine day 10’. He subsequently shared a slapstick …

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The Nature of Things

A rare exhibition from ‘somewhere in Northeast India’ forces you to see both the woods and the trees ♦ This story was originally published in India Today. Composing a landscape is inherently an act of taming nature. There isn’t necessarily a direct relation between the rules of artistic composition (perspective, thirds, movement within the frame) …

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Review: The Biscuit

Lizzie Collingham traces the journey of the biscuit from sustenance to sweet treats ♦ This story was originally published in India Today. This summer, when migrant workers streamed out of India’s locked down cities, one of the recurrent images of their long walks to their home villages was of packets of biscuits: sometimes all they …

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