Essays

I Don’t Look, Therefore I Am

Sonali Kokra

Giving up mirrors for 31 days gave Sonali Kokra the time and space to reflect upon and reclaim her life. What began as an experiment in self imagery turned out to be an unexpectedly radical act of self love

The Sage

Ritesh Uttamchandani

At the age of 84, S Paul, the man who shaped Indian photojournalism, still takes his camera out for a daily shoot

How to Frame the Taliban

Chinki Sinha

A veteran of many wars, photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg found Afghan terrain tricky, the language unfamiliar and the recklessness scary. Yet, he kept returning to document it all

Waiting for the 20th Surgery

Aanchal Bansal

A 12-year-old girl was gang-raped so brutally in Jaipur in August 2012 that her vagina tore and merged with her rectum. After 19 surgeries, her condition remains heart- rending, and Rajasthan government officials can’t wait to get her off their hands

Ladies’ Special

Drashti Thakkar

Inside the ladies’ compartment of the Mumbai local is a world that is both strange and familiar, compassionate and vicious; where lives are saved by generous hands. Yet a girl who has fallen down could be trampled for blocking the entrance.

Writer’s Bloc

Indrajit Hazra

Hanif Kureishi’s sharp new novel is not only a riff on the Naipaul-French saga, but also an exploration of his own fascination for writers and their habits

Love in the Time of HIV

Sohini Chattopadhyay

When Najaraus met Maitri, she was an HIV-positive widow, and he an AIDS awareness worker. Nine years later, with a little grit and a little fib, they are married, living together, still in love—and Najaraus is still HIV-negative

That Girl in the Well of Death

Pooja Rathod

Twenty-year-old biker stuntwoman Pooja Rathod talks about riding on a wall and risking her neck for her independence

Drink in Peace

Michael Edison Hayden

On the dive bar as a haven for the trend-bucking citydweller

Mrs Sen and I

Gouri Chatterjee

Suchitra Sen signified the acme of modernity to the Bengali middle-class of the 1950s and 1960s playing characters who speak English with apparent ease, wear chic clothes, and have careers which they usually choose to put on hold. She was not an actress; her greatest performance was in playing herself: Suchitra Sen, the luminous superstar. And with her reclusiveness, she cannily created a legend of herself