Weekend Reads
- “Narendra Modi’s innuendo in an election speech in Banaskantha, in which he strung together communal canards and conspiracy theories, marks a new and dangerous low in Indian politics,” writes Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express.
- Mani Shankar Aiyar, writing for NDTV, thanks Prime Minister Narendra Modi for ending his “has-been” status and making him relevant again during the Gujarat elections.
- In the Print, Shekhar Gupta pens a tribute to his “young” friend Lieutenant General JFR “Jake” Jacob, who negotiated the surrender with Pakistan’s AA Khan Niazi.
- Bhanuj Kappal in Blink writes of how, while bigger acts might have had more commercial considerations, 2017 was a big year for protest music.
- With the extreme horrors of the last few years behind them, Kashmiris are discovering what it is like to play football again, writes Shail Desai in Mint.
- Ritika Chopra in the Indian Express takes a close look at what the engineering education industry actually looks like in a multi-part series called Devalued Degree.
- “Digging into social media reveals that there is a large and growing community of Indian Hindu Nazis, who are digitally connected to neo-Nazi counterparts across the world,” writes Shrenik Rao in Haaretz.
- “In power, Sonia was an enigma,” writes Raghu Karnad in the Atlantic on the change of guard in the Indian National Congress.
- “Every woman has a story, the man who ‘accidentally’ touches her in the metro, the schoolboys who chase her in the park for sport, the masturbating pervert late at night on the bus. We learn to ignore it – rule #1 of the street: never, ever make eye contact – but sometimes it spills over into a serious crime. And, always it’s our fault,” writes Namita Bhandare in the Hindustan Times.
- “Literary fiction is in crisis, and writers across the land are burning the midnight oil in their garrets, teaching or slogging away in unrelated jobs to keep the fire ablaze in the grate,” writes Claire Armistead in the Guardian.
