1. Jyoti Punwani explains how the induction of former Maharashtra Chief Minister Narayan Rane into the Union Cabinet “puts the final seal on the rift between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Uddhav Thackeray-headed Shiv Sena.”
  2. “Modi’s India is a living nightmare for India’s Muslims. And Muslim journalists are the first in line to report and write on it, to confront it and document it as professionals,” writes Mohammad Ali. “Yet we are too afraid to speak. We cannot report and write what we feel, and that is our destiny. Our stories cannot help against the horrors of Hindutva anymore. Most Indian Muslim journalists I know are facing depression and trauma. And it is only the privileged who have the opportunity to reflect on their identity – the assault on their identity.”
  3. Prabhijit Singh speaks to farmer union leader Rajinder Singh Deepsinghwala on how the seven-month-old protest movement “has demanded not merely a removal of the farm laws but the expansion of democratic space in the country.”
  4. An investigation by Monika Mondal reveals the tremendous water crisis caused by India’s massive sugar industry.
  5. The decision to end the 149-year-old tradition of shifting capitals between Jammu and Kashmir between summer and winter “has left hundreds of families worried that their decades-old links with families across the mountains may fade away,” writes Peerzada Ashiq.
  6. “At the heart of this debate on climate change and meat consumption is the failure to recognise differentiation at international and national spheres. The developing world must be afforded the space to enhance the level of wellbeing of their populations while moving towards fewer emission-intensive production processes,” writes Aravindhan Nagarajan.
  7. “What [Dilip Kumar] was truly matchless at was in creating a demand for himself, sometimes at the cost of the film he was in – a legacy that weighs heavier on the Hindi film fraternity than his finely nuanced performances,” writes Naseerudin Shah.
  8. “A large part of India’s underlying protectionist tendencies – its unwillingness to join new trading agreements, and the use of tariff and non-tariff barriers to guard domestic manufacturing firms – can be explained by the absence of enough of such highly productive firms. In a nutshell, the argument here is that India does not have enough highly productive firms, which in turn leads to less lobbying for trade liberalisation,” writes Srijan Shukla.
  9. Writing about a new biography of Edward Said, Hussein Omar says “by extracting him from the contexts in which he was formed, by seeing Said as inaugurating a debate rather than as a latecomer to it, [Timothy] Brennan exceptionalizes him. This is in part due to Brennan’s continuous fidelity to what Said wrote and said about himself. But it is also borne out of Brennan’s inability to access, or appreciate, an intellectual tradition that barely registers in popular and academic Anglophone consciousness.”
  10. “Though technology as a concept traces back to classical times, when it described the systematic treatment of knowledge in its broadest sense, its more contemporary usage relates almost wholly either to the mechanical, the electronic, or the atomic,” writes Simon Winchester. “And though the consequences of all three have been broad, ubiquitous, and profound, we have really had little enough time to consider them thoroughly. The sheer newness of the thing intrigued Antoine de Saint-Exupéry when he first considered the sleekly mammalian curves of a well-made airplane. We have just three centuries of experience with the mechanical new and even less time – under a century – fully to consider the accumulating benefits and disbenefits of its electronic and nuclear kinsmen. Except, though, for one curious outlier, which predates all and puzzles us still.”