Weekend Reads:

  1. Aria Thaker in the Caravan takes a close look at the larger ecosystem of people working on Aadhaar, and how they blur the lines between public and private.
  2. “WhatsApp is one of the biggest law-and-order challenges before Indian police and administrative officers today,” writes Singdha Poonam in Granta. “As a young superintendent of police in Jharkhand asked me, ‘How can we stop a riot or lynching from happening until we know a rumour is circulating and can plan action accordingly?’ They have no option but to find a way.”
  3. “Many centuries ago, a Dravidian language and an Indo-Aryan language were fused together to fashion a distinctly new literary idiom,” Karthik Venkatesh in Mint writes about Manipravalam, a fusion of Malayalam and Sanskrit.
  4. Suvojit Bagchi, in the Hindu, writes about Yaba, a pleasure drug that flows “freely to the northeast across the Myanmar, Thailand, Bangladesh tri-junction”.
  5. Kai Schultz in the New York Times documents the stories of Indians fighting to bring down the law that criminalises gay sex and end the discrimination that comes with it.
  6. “Ravish Kumar, anchor of NDTV’s Prime Time show, is pioneering a new form of public journalism,” writes Amrit Dhillon in the Guardian. “Giving a voice to the poor and to smalltown India, every night at 9 pm he chooses an issue that affects millions of Indians, broadcasting their personal stories.”
  7. “In the final analysis, it would seem that Modi is not a reformer by instinct, conviction or persuasion,” writes Puja Mehra in the Hindu. “Politics, not economics, drives him. The economy under him is not significantly reformed; the high-growth path remains out of reach. Commentators may be overstressing his government’s record on the macroeconomy and understating the policy slip-ups.”
  8. Anna Delvey tried to pull the ‘Nigerian Prince’ scam, and because she did it to high society in New York, it worked, writes Jessica Pressler in The Cut.
  9. “The unsettling thing about spending two days at a convention of people who believe that Earth is flat isn’t the possibility that you, too, might come to accept their world view, although I did worry a little about that,” writes Alan Burdick in the New Yorker. “Rather, it’s the very real likelihood that, after sitting through hours of presentations on ‘scientism’, lightning angels, and NASA’s many conspiracies – the moon-landing hoax, the International Fake Station, so-called satellites – and in chatting with I.T. specialists, cops, college students, and fashionably dressed families with young children, all of them unfailingly earnest and lovely, you will come to actually understand why a growing number of people are dead certain that Earth is flat. Because that truth is unnerving.”
  10. Who will pay Kim Jong Un’s hotel bill if the US-North Korea summit actually takes place? John Hudson in the Washington Post looks at some of the thorny details that still have to be hammered out.