Weekend Reads

  1. “As my plane now wings towards India to a place without Gauri [Lankesh], my mind is a cauldron of fragmented memories,” writes Chidanand Rajghatta in the Times of India. “One phrase keeps repeating and resonating in my mind: Amazing Grace.”
  2. “It takes a long time to shape a personality like [Gauri Lankesh’s]. And how little time it took to sniff it out! But can her fighting spirit be ever silenced?” asks VS Sreedhara in Deccan Herald.
  3. Ajay Sukumaran in Outlook writes that Lankesh’s death, by unknown gunmen in the middle of Bangalore, should provoke Karnatka Chief Minister Siddharamaiah into action.
  4. “[Your child] does not read because he has never seen you read,” Jerry Pinto writes in the Hindu. “He sees you come home and slump in front of the television set and so that is what he wants to do. Monkey see, monkey do.”
  5. Payal Majumdar Upreti in Blink writes about the difficulties involved in upgrading police facilities and reforming the force all over the country, especially when, more than 70 years after Independence, the entire structure rests on the 1861 Indian Police Act.
  6. “A wondrous shadowgraphy is before us. Figures off-loading crate after crate. Figures bent over giant nets. Figures shuffling around in plastic sheets tied over lungis. Figures wolfing down mounds of rice with watery dal, oblivious to the smell of fish and diesel and sweat.” Moumita Chaudhuri in the Telegraph introduces us to Shankarpur’s fishermen.
  7. Pragya Singh in Outlook examines a Western Uttar Pradesh Jat’s community decision to validate future alliances with ‘close castes’, and what that says about the work varna status actually works.
  8. After two-and-a-half years of preparation, Akarsh Sharma in Mint takes stock of India’s preparation for the 2017 Fifa Under-17 World Cup, both in terms of facilities as well as the first-ever Indian team to play at a World Cup.
  9. “In short, far from being ‘based on the premise that privacy is a fundamental right’, Aadhaar is the antithesis of the right to privacy,” writes Jean Drèze in the Hindu.
  10. “The atmosphere of languid, courtly freethinking that Ibrahim [Adil Shah II] encouraged is reflected in the Bijapur school of miniatures which underwent its Renaissance under Ibrahim’s patronage,” writes William Dalrymple in Open magazine. “In these wonderful otherworldly images, water drips from fountains as courtesans as voluptuous as the goddesses of south-Indian stone sculpture attend bejewelled princes. There is a sense of timelessness and calm.”