Weekend Reads
- As India gears up for its semi-final match against Australia in the Cricket World Cup next week, Dileep Premachandran in Mint takes a look at how far the women’s team has come in the last few years.
- “A lot of adjectives are thrown around when the subject is the Mumbai Suburban Railway,” writes Bhanuj Kappal in Blink. “But in recent years, as the 164-year-old railway system struggles to ferry over 75 lakh passengers a day, the adjective that comes up more often is ‘deadly’.”
- Prime Minister Narendra Modi had planned to provide skills training to a massive number of Indians under a scheme with a Rs 6,000-crore budget. R Srinivasan, in the Hindu, says that it is now evident that, as per the ministry’s own findings, the scheme has “turned into a gigantic racket for milking state funds”.
- Pranav Dixit in Buzzfeed News tells us how Silicon Valley content companies, like Netflix and Amazon Prime, censor their products even if they don’t legally have to, hoping to not offend the Indian audience.
- “I never looked back, all the while running. The idea was to just outrun him to the traffic lights and get on the first auto I could find. Everything else was a blur.” Titash Sen in the Ladies Finger writes about the constant fear women are subjected to, and how banning ladies night will not solve anything.
- Ankita Dwivedi Johri in the Indian Express talks to three girls of Madhya Pradesh’s Umaria district, said to have the worst menstrual health management in the country. “Twice every day, we change our langots, wash the stained cloth and dry it under our clothes so that the men don’t see it. I don’t go to school or to play, but even then my clothes stain.”
- “In their pantheon of fake news, nothing beats a pamphlet of 1946 that emanated from Bengal and soon spread through the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) and even Maharashtra,” writes Akshaya Mukul in the Hindu, recounting a story of viral falsities decades before social media.
- “Don’t be shy about asking your teen where she has been, who she has spent time with, or why she has receipts from Cypriot bank wire transfers hidden under a false bottom of her jewelry case.” Tom Russell in McSweeny’s, has a useful guide on how to talk to your teen about colluding with Russia.
- “The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.” Read an interview with Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the prestigious Fields Medal, who died this week.
- Jeet Heer, in the New Republic, finds similiarties between the Coen Brothers’ movie Burn After Reading, and real life: “The plot of the movie is driven by imbeciles who have only the most limited understanding of the world around them. As such, they call to mind figures like Donald Trump Jr.”
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