Essays

Confronting My Assaulter

arindam

One day in her teens, a man who she treated like her father tried to rape her. She escaped, but the next day, she looked him in the eye and made him apologise. This suddenly changed the power equation

Internet Rehab

Atreyee Majumder

When she realised she was checking Twitter before brushing her teeth in the morning, Atreyee Majumder figured she had to sober up. Especially if she wanted to finish her PhD thesis in this lifetime

Kitchen Confidential

Sohini Chattopadhyay

Having spent three months snooping around a restaurant, Sohini Chattopadhyay reveals why even great recipes sometimes don’t make it to the menu, the food service industry’s unforgiving hierarchy, and other secrets

The Right Thing to Do

Ghulam Mohammad Malik

Even during Kashmir’s worst years of insurgency, says Ghulam Mohammad Malik, a retired Muslim teacher who has been protecting a temple in Srinagar for over a decade now, no one ever raised an eyebrow at his presence there

Has Pankaj Mishra Ever Been to South Dakota?

Ethan Casey

For a writer whose first book was a travelogue around small-town India, Pankaj Mishra seems strangely unwilling to engage with the complexities, or provincialities, of the United States. In his recent scathing review of Harvard historian Niall Ferguson’s book Civilisation: The West and the Rest, as in his other writings, Mishra seems interested in America only to the extent that he can caricature its ruling elite in order to knock them down, says Ethan Casey