A maroon Hindustan Ambassador sparkles in the glorious summer sun in front of the picturesque Heyford railway station in north Oxfordshire. While bumping into Indians at every corner in the UK is quite usual, having the good old bulbous Indian car waiting at a quaint station by the Oxford Canal comes as a pleasant surprise.…
“Bahut bura hua, a lot of wrongs were committed,” the auto driver told me as he drove me around Delhi. He’d overheard my phone conversation with a friend on my impending visit to his home district in Muzaffarnagar. As soon as I hung up, he adjusted the rear-view mirror and changed his sitting position and…
The Bharatiya Janata Party has had to reevaluate its position on a number of issues since coming to power, from rail ticket prices to classified documents dealing with wars in India’s history. One little discussed instance is the party’s changed stance on the Land Boundary Agreement with Bangladesh, signed in 1974. The LBA – also…
Read more Why Sushma Swaraj’s little-noticed change of tune in Dhaka is a good sign
The evil that men do lives after them The good is oft interred with their bones. Shakespeare could not ring truer than in the labour colony – called the ‘Coolie Lines’ – of the Northbrook Jute Mill here in Champdani in West Bengal’s Hooghly district, almost 35km from Kolkata. Days after a section of them…
Read more Why the Jackfruit Tree Had Everything & Nothing to Do With the CEO’s Murder
DHARAMSALA, India — This year marks the first election in which Indian-born Tibetan refugees have the right to vote, but as the state of Himachal Pradesh, including the residents of this shady hill station, went to the polls on Wednesday, there were few Tibetans among them. “It is magnanimous on the part of the Indian…
Read more Indian-Born Tibetans Allowed to Vote, but Few Take Up Offer
Poll date: 12 May Jadavpur Key candidates: Sugata Bose, TMC I Sujan Chakraborty, CPM I Samir Aich, INC An elderly woman in a crumpled white cotton sari stands by the roadside, clutching a bunch of flowers, as a massive All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) rally meanders down the serpentine lanes of Santoshpur in south Kolkata’s…
KOLKATA, India — After his 16-year-old daughter was gang-raped twice in their Madhyamgram neighborhood in north Kolkata in October, then set on fire, allegedly by associates of her rapists, Rama Shankar Jha was distraught. His daughter died of her burns in a Kolkata hospital in December, and he petitioned the Calcutta High Court to bring…
Read more Kolkata Rape Victims Find a Police Officer Who’s on Their Side
He promises to give me “something extra” as we begin the interview in the lobby of a hotel on Kolkata’s Park Street. In the city for the Kolkata Literary Festival (8-13 January), he’s been giving several interviews. Two stacks of his just-released novel, Land Where I Flee, and the 2012 collection of short stories, The Gurkha’s Daughter,…
Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has won the country’s 10th parliamentary elections in a disputed poll that was boycotted by the opposition and its allies and held amid large-scale violence that left at least 18 dead. Armed with a landslide “victory,” Hasina is set to form the next government even as questions are being raised…
Read more Election Fails to Resolve Bangladesh’s Political Turmoil
Anuradha Sharma 