Michiel Baas’s book that looks at the social settings and aspirational trajectories of India’s new middle class is an important contribution to the understanding of urban centers in the country “Little things” was how VS Naipaul began his response to a journalist’s question on how he could foresee in the late Eighties that India was […]

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It was a measure of Pranab Mukherjee’s longevity and influence in Delhi’s power corridors that the account of his career could also be read as an insider’s view of the shifting sands of Indian politics As he entered his eightieth year in December 2014, and almost midway through his presidential term, Pranab Mukherjee got his […]

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The tendency to identify ‘toxic families’ and locate them in a region is rooted in the hostility with which group-identity-obsessed commentariat views the strong glue of family  “Baap mar gelan anhariya mein, aau beta ke naam powerhouse.” This one-liner, which translates to “father died in darkness, but the son is called powerhouse”, is a punchline […]

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The depiction of Bengali women as evil temptresses goes back to colonial times, when migrant workers from what is now Bihar went to work in Calcutta. This is the subtext of the attacks on Rhea Chakraborty and her role in late Sushant Singh Rajput’s life The online abuse of women of any region or community […]

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Amar Singh was a resourceful backroom operator, but it was no substitute for his lack of public base In the last eight months, the setting for his monologues on social media had moved from his home to a lonely hospital bed in Singapore. Amar Singh was not new to the quirky side of time. Not […]

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Films will have you believe that the ‘free spirits’ are the true heroes. But not everyone has the luxury of indulging in flights of fancy In recent years, the negative portrayal of engineers in India’s popular culture has often acted as a subtext for something else. The larger target is derision towards regular officer-goers, the […]

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Why lightning strikes are a bigger fear than Covid in Bihar Under the glow of a mobile phone, a relative gathers paperwork for the dead at the Haspura Referral Hospital in south Bihar’s Aurangabad district. That’s how Hindustan, the state’s most-read daily, captured the tragedy of the recent deaths in a lightning strike, through a photograph. […]

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Meet Navin Choudhary, the bureaucrat from Bihar who has become J&K’s first non-local domicile After being interviewed by several news outlets and posing for photographs, a pleasant sense of fatigue was visible on the faces of Vaidehi and Deokant Choudhary at their home in Majhaulia village of Hayaghat block in Bihar’s Darbhanga district. They were […]

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