Weekend Reads:
- Kiran Jonnalagadda in Mint explains just how much data the Aadhaar ecosystem is leaking and how hopelessly unequipped and willfully blind the Unique Identification Authority of India has been when it comes to this question.
- In the Economic & Political Weekly, a game that introduces to the many obstacles that come in the way of getting access to your food rations in Jharkhand, not least of which is Aadhaar authentication.
- “Aaliya Wani” writes the first piece of a new series from the Ladies Finger looking at women undercover, telling the story of what it is like to be Kashmiri woman who smokes cigarettes.
- “Umer was a small man: small in stature, small in the forest department hierarchy. A daily-wage tracker, he put his life at stake every day, patrolling the roads, tracks and nullahs in the Betla beat of the Palamau National Park, with just a slim bamboo stick.” Prosenjit Das Gupta in the Indian Express introduces us to one of the unsung faces that make wildlife experiences in India possible.
- Shamik Bag in Mint returns to Rishikesh on the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ tour to India, to remember what local influences meant to the world’s most famous band.
- “I would visit Pakistan, click pictures and return usually within seven to ten days. I once clicked pictures of the T-59 tanks, which Pakistan had procured from China.” Vikas Vasudeva in the Hindu talks to 77-year-old Kashmir Singh, an Indian spy who was captured in Pakistan and spent more than three decades in jail, never once admitting what he did.
- “In place of standing up for the autonomy of JNU and its particular character forged through collective efforts of an academic community, men with little respect for academic values are demolishing the institution,” writes Parnal Chirmuley in the Indian Express.
- “Because of the amateurish way the Babe report was handled (her wine choices; her outfit), and the way it was written with an almost prurient and unnecessarily macabre interest in the minute details of their interaction (“the claw”), it left the subject open to further attacks, the kind that are entirely, exhaustingly predictable,” writes Julianne Escobedo Shepherd in Jezebel on the Aziz Ansari episode.
- Celebrated author Elena Ferrante begins her column for the Guardian with a short recollection of her first love.
- “I was awed by the gap between my capacity for judgment and the unbearably limited options faced by my grandparents. I fixated on the ideas of “impossible choice” and of having “no choice.” But what interests me now is that I think resistance can take the shape of insisting on making a choice, even when the choice is framed as one between unacceptable options,” Masha Gessen writes about authoritarian worlds and internal choices in the New York Review of Books.
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