Weekend reads

  1. An editorial in DailyO says that the lawsuit against investigative journalist Josy Joseph should be an opportunity for media houses to unite and fight for freedom. 
  2. Ankita Dwivedi Johri in the Indian Express travels with a dance orchestra in Uttar Pradesh for a look inside the wedding entertainment industry.
  3. In Pakistan, five girls were killed for having fun. Pamela Constable, in the Washington Post, writes on how the story then took an even darker twist.
  4. The Caravan publishes an edited version of an incomplete story about cancer treatment in India, written by journalist Sumegha Gulati, who died of the diease earlier this year.
  5. The acquired taste for shutki – Bengali for dried fish – is one of the delineators of culture among some communities, writes Arundhati Ray in Blink. 
  6. Gopalkrishna Gandhi in the Telegraph says India has no one to look up to, no “monks”: “Monks of that kind the freedom struggle gave to Bharat Gaon. Self-abnegating, self-sacrificing, perhaps self-deluding as well.” 
  7. “Unlike its predecessors, the third edition of the Kochi Biennale seems to privilege the speculative instead,” writes Rosalyn D’Mello in Open. “The quietly meditative, the subtly connotative, the process-oriented, without being dryly conceptual.”
  8. Rohit PS in the Hindu points out that even though sterilisation is simpler in men than women, it is evidently clear that Indian men are not willing to share the burden of birth control. 
  9. The Ladies Finger has a mega list of books by women authors in 2016, in case you need something to read this holiday season. 
  10. La La Land shows us what “love used to feel like, before we dived headfirst into the age of irony and started to abide by an uncodified playbook”, writes Karanjeet Kaur in Arre.