I am quite chuffed to tell you that this weekend I am going to hobnob with some very well-known literary giants from this region, namely the eastern Himalayas roughly comprising Darjeeling, Sikkim and the Northeast. Cafe the Twins–it is my favourite place in Siliguri and I shall tell you more about it later–and Chhimeki, a…
Prime Minister Narendra Modi finally spoke out on Manipur, after 79 days of violence. It took a viral video of a horrific crime against two tribal women* to finally break his silence. It’s a welcome move, I thought at first, in hopes that his uttering something could help stop the ethnic conflict going on in…
Last year, a colleague of mine told me about a tea planter who had started a school for the deaf and mute at a tea garden in the Dooars. It was one of those “see if you could do a story on it” type of calls that we journalists often get. I am usually wary…
“It is our fault.” I have simply lost count of people telling this to me, in the context of the second wave of the Covid 19 pandemic ravaging the country. “We let our guards down.” If you have also been doing that, let me break the news to you: You have been gaslit. You have…
Read more Ignorance is bliss, not positivity. Be ‘negative’, ask questions.
The only person who was happy when my Italy trip got cancelled was the French banker whose memoir I was ghostwriting. He was in a hurry to see his book published. And I was looking forward to a two-week break in Italy. The flight tickets were done and I was already in Calcutta to apply…
Originally posted on Anuradha Sharma:
A tin can tied to a dog’s tail. An overwhelmed Rabindranath Tagore thus described the euphoria surrounding his Nobel Prize in Literature 103 years ago. “The perfect whirlwind of public excitement it has given rise to is frightful,” he wrote in a letter to close friend William Rothenstein, the English…
She hurtles down the empty road clutching the lifeless body of her three-year-old son, howling. Her husband walks after her, their other child in his arms. A man, an onlooker, with a cell phone is filming them while walking with them. At some point she sits on the road, rending the air with her wails,…
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s admirers are always quick to point out his humble origins to justify their unquestioning love for him. “He has made it in spite of being a chaiwala in the past. He made it on his own merit (as opposed to you-know-who, the dynast),” is something I keep hearing. Modi’s PR machinery…
Last year, The Economist organised the Open Future international essay competition on the subject of Climate Change. Nearly 2,400 youths from over 110 countries entered the contest to answer the question, “How to respond to climate change?” Intelligence enthusiasts at the British weekly got thinking. They wanted to know how artificial intelligence (AI) would respond to the…
If you ask me, the single biggest contributor to the mess that India is in now is our media. Any problem–be it economy or the endangering of civil rights–would not have come to this pass if media had done its job. Just its job of reporting facts–nothing more, nothing less. But, Indian media–most of it–works…
Anuradha Sharma 