I have been horrified by how people from other countries have been tracking India’s record over the past few months. They say our unplanned lockdown failed miserably, adding that our government had all the time in the world to put safety measures into place and failed. …

I am always amused when someone in my extended circle of acquaintances refers to my fellow Indians as intelligent. They base this on the usual clichés trotted out by NRIs, about how Indians run Silicon Valley. They also base this on random WhatsApp forwards that have increased over the past…

I was recently called a ‘ricebag convert’ by some well-meaning folk on social media. This wasn’t a surprise, because the people doling out these labels were all supporters of a government that hands out rewards based on how abusive one can be. I didn’t react because I liked the idea…

Ask any single woman you know what life in India is like. It doesn’t matter which part of the country she is in, because the only thing that will change is the level of depravity she must confront and deal with on a daily basis. If this sounds like an…

Two things disturbed me more than the lockdown I had to deal with after a pandemic was declared earlier this year. First, an announcement that popular skin-lightening product Fair & Lovely would now be called Glow & Lovely to seem more politically correct. The second was an attack on students…

Prizes can be superfluous. I say this because we all know how frustrating they can be, year after year, as debates about the best film, album or book pop up at dinner tables. We know these decisions are subjective, and almost always political, but wait for them anyway because celebrating…

On February 2 this year, the poet Ilya Kaminsky posted the following to his Twitter account: ‘My grandmother, who was sent to Siberia for 10 years, said that in February, birds would freeze to the ground. So, prisoners, who were sent to work, would grab small birds, put them under…

I realize now that 2004 was an awful year for English poetry in Bombay. It didn’t seem particularly terrible at the time, because it takes distance to allow us a sense of measure; to gauge what we have won or lost. …

Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai loomed large in India’s consciousness back in the summer of 1994. The former was crowned Miss Universe that year, while the latter took home the title of Miss World. For me, both events faded in comparison to the suicide of Kurt Cobain, lead singer of…