The Politics of Symbolism
Around 4 am, May 7, 2025, when the first, fated crow was about to sing its sweetest early morning song, a writer-friend called from Srinagar. Her voice sounded urgent, but…
Amit Sengupta
Adolescence: The pressure to look perfect online
Aayushi Rana is a postgraduate in History from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), and a Senior Researcher at Digitial Forensics Research Analytics Centre (DFRAC), a Delhi-based fact-checking organization. She is also a…
In contemporary media, the dog loves eating the dog:Seema Mustafa
We attack each other on television; we gloat when a colleague is attacked or arrested; we have no empathy when journalists are jailed; we have become a nasty bunch. This…
Solidarity is the Political Version of Love
The moral of the story, don’t hold on to something as silly as copyright. We are here to change society. Disseminate your articles/videos/photos or whatever content you produce, through as…
Victory will be that of Mahatma Gandhi: Umar Khalid
Why is Umar Khalid being denied bail again and again? We are reproducing the speech delivered by Umar Khalid in Amravati on February 17, 2020, for the readers and all…
Israel has killed all life in Gaza
They are blocking food. Essential needs. Medicine. They are using food as pressure tactics. A freezing winter is coming. It is going to be tough. Thousands have vanished. Refugee camps are…
There is no Journalistic freedom in Jammu & Kashmir: Anuradha Bhasin
Anuradha Bhasin is the Managing Editor of the ‘Kashmir Times’. She is the author of the book ‘A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir after Article 370’, published by Harper Collins…
Barefoot Magic: The Untold Story of Tulsidas Balaram, The Legendary Footballer
Tulsidas Balaram: The Boy, the Hero, The Tormented Footballer. A Biography. by Sudipta Biswas, Hawakal Publishers, Pg: 329, Price: Rs 550 In a country obsessed with multimillionaire male cricketers, superbly…
FIR Against Editors Guild of India on Manipur: Some Facts
An FIR has been filed against three journalists who represented the Editors Guild of India (EGI) to document the ground situation in Manipur, including the role of the media, as…
Book Review: Marginalised but not Defeated
Marginalised but not Defeated Tarun Kanti Bose Uppal Publishing House Price: 1,295 Year: 2023 Pg: 277 The book, like the author, a seasoned public interest journalist, travels far and wide,…
Death came from the sky: One massacre, too many
Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. War, its infinite brutality and bestiality! It’s eternal, tragic, deathly realism. It’s private and public sorrow. A war within. A dictatorial State in a bloody and damned…
Release Alaa Abd el-Fattah
The on-going high profile international get together of presidents and prime ministers, top leaders, policy-makers and experts at the climate change conference of COP27 at the Red Sea Resort at…
When Forest Rights meets Right to Education
With the horrors of the deadly virus still in the air, this would appear to be like a remarkable fairy tale in the post-Covid pandemic scenario, almost like a dream…
Threat of state-takeover of forests alarms Tripura’s indigenous people
The lingering and fractured memories of three decades of CPM rule in Tripura are not so rosy anymore, even as the people today seem totally distraught and disgusted with the…
Bengal’s patachitra artists paint their way through Covid crisis
We are humans Sons of one mother One could be Hindu One could be Muslim The tribals call their god Gurung and Marung The Christians call him God The Muslims…
Covid-hit Adivasis of MP under attack from communal forces
In the post-Covid era, even while the deprivations and despair of the pandemic and lockdowns continue, not only Muslims and Christians, Adivasis too are being systematically attacked by the Sangh…
Forest rights violations under cover of Covid
>> The young one had gone to the city to earn his livelihood and food for his poor family. The pandemic and lockdown stopped all work and all earnings. Thereby…
Umran Malik: Nurture This Raw Talent
He is not from the troubled, picturesque, paradise Valley. He is from Jammu. And soon, sooner than India or the world can imagine, Umran Malik, 22, the newest fast-bowling sensation,…
Covid becomes excuse to attempt eviction of Rajaji National Park forest dwellers
Close to Saharanpur in Western UP and Haridwar and Dehradun in the hill state of Uttarakhand, sprawls the dense forests of the Rajaji National Park. With elephant corridors stretching across…
Demonetisation, GST and Covid doom India’s handloom sector
The centuries old Indian handloom industry, spread across multiple and remote geographical terrains across the country, was in serious crisis for a long time and a combination of demonetization, GST…
Durga sculptors of Kumartali survive the pandemic
Amidst the maze of lanes and by-lanes, it’s an obscure alley in North Calcutta, close to the famous Sobhabazar and Sutanuti, with its incredible, inherited kaleidoscope of architecture with unique…
How Covid in India became cover for rampant human rights violations
Even while a draconian lockdown was underway in late March 2020, and as thousands of migrant workers and their emaciated families escaped the pandemic in a helpless long march on…
Rural and urban women hit hardest by Covid-induced unemployment
It is well-nigh impossible to obtain accurate information in a country where data is routinely fudged or camouflaged, be it the number of deaths due to the killer virus, or,…
The Indian media and Covid – Part One: Locked up during Lockdown
Note: In this series of articles senior journalist Amit Sengupta examines the role of the Indian media during the two years of the Covid pandemic. Part One: Locked up during…
To be in an Indian prison during Covid – Part One
As Covid raged across India over the last two years hundreds of thousands of Indian prisoners suffered the most. Under ‘permanent lockdown’ their voices remained unheard behind the walls of…
Notes from the Covid Lockdown…
Painting of Afghan woman by Sarmistha Sarker On a sunny Covid winter day, even while people waited for the third wave to fasten its grip, the Birla Academy of Art…
A humble TB treatment center weathers the Covid storm
Almost an hour from the bustling railway station of Madhupur in Jharkhand, beyond the vast green landscape and kuccha and pucca roads, lies the small and beautiful Santhal village of…
Coping with Covid in Jharkhand’s magical Madhupur
In the bustling roadside market around the small, quaint and laid-back railway station of Jharkhand’s Madhupur, where locals, passenger and express trains crisscross the railway tracks towards Asansol and Burdwan…
Covid hits survivors of the Bhopal Gas Disaster hardest
It has been 37 years since the deadly killer gas, methyl isocyanate, spread from the Union Carbide factory like a suffocating blanket of death across the old city of Bhopal,…
Goa’s villagers return to fishing to survive tourism downturn
It is a picture postcard scene of Goa’s big, best-selling beaches like Calangute, Anjuna and Vagator, overflowing, with Indian tourists herding together, eating and drinking, and frolicking in the sea.…
Waste workers contributions ignored during Covid crisis
Waste, sanitation workers and safai karamcharis across the country have been perhaps the worst-hit community among India’s vast unorganized labour force due to the Covid pandemic and repeated lockdown. When…
Covid adds to anxieties of former stateless people on Indo-Bangladesh border
They are called ‘chitmahals’ or ‘paper palaces’. For decades, the people living in these twilight zones on the border between India and Bangladesh have been searching for citizenship, constitutional rights…
Sonagachi sex workers band together to brave the Covid pandemic
Even as the fear of the third Covid wave lingers, for the sex workers in Kolkata and other districts of Bengal, life is just about limping back to a fragmented,…
RSS grows in West Bengal, but no match for Didi’s outreach during Covid
The recent victory of the BJP in 70 plus seats in the assembly, while emerging as the main opposition, and its stupendous and surprising gain of 19 seats in the…
Bangla Sanskriti Manch: Spreading solidarity in Covid times
It’s a beautiful new beginning on the day of Rakhi across some villages and small towns in several districts of Bengal. Resurrecting a tradition started by Rabindranath Tagore, volunteers of…
‘Red Volunteers’ shine amidst Covid crisis in West Bengal
The Covid pandemic has ushered in a massive ray of hope on the ground for the Left in West Bengal, thanks to the emergence of the youthful Red Volunteers responding…
A day in a Kolkata Covid-19 ward
“Dadu, Dadu…Get up Dadu. Eat something. Take your medicines. Drink a glass of water. Wake up Dadu. Oh Dadu…” ‘Dadu’ means grandfather in Bengali. When she utters the word, with…
From state to civil society, how Bengal responded to Covid
During the peak of the second surge of the deadly killer virus in summer this year, parts of urban India were trapped in daily despair -- amidst a non-stop spiral…
NRC list: Tension rises in Assam, Army deployed, CM appeals for peace
Such mass-scale profiling has been done officially only in Germany of the Jews by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. Now, 40 lakh people in Assam have found themselves trapped in a…
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