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Essays

Indonesia’s Uncle Pai

His comics bear an uncanny resemblance to the signature Amar Chitra Katha style. And yet, Raden Ahmed Kosasih, the father of the Indonesian comic, was doing this many years before Pai began his own epic effort.

16 Months in Antarctica

The first Indian woman to set foot on this isolated desert continent, Dr Kanwal Vilku found that she not only had to endure two extreme winters here, but also the hostility of the 49 men she had travelled with

The Final Sin

The Church refused to let Jolly Thomas bury her husband till she gave them 25 cents of land. Forty years later, she recalls her lonely court battle against the institution, which she won only to find her husband’s grave now lying outside church premises. This is the story of how Jolly built a chapel, her own Taj Mahal, for her beloved husband Thampi

Joke Studio India

The UN project-like earnestness with which popular singers like Sunidhi Chauhan are made to collaborate with not-so-famous talent from across the country makes for spectacularly unmoving performances

The Curious Case of Elfriede Maria Schmidt

A 77-year-old German lady who’d made a Kochi hotel her home for the past eight years died last month. Her body has been lying unclaimed since. We went in search of her past and found four threads unspooling a lonely and wounded life

A Paean to the Paan

My father’s affair with paan introduced me early to the delicate temptations of the green leaf. And left me a lifelong lover and connoisseur, unmindful of mild stains on my reputation

To Catch an Assassin

This woman was promised the earth for helping the police nab Rajiv Gandhi’s killers. All she has got instead are death threats and the offer of a film role, complains K Muniyamma

The Angriest Eye

Sexual assault cannot be explained away by geography, morality, emotionality, causality, and certainly not anodyne reportage that allows you to skim and move on, says A Ranganayaki, who knows

Diary of a Newly Thin Person

As a pleasantly plump, accommodating teenager lost all her disfiguring weight, this is what she saw in the mirror: a preening, arrogant stranger. Does your body then shape your personality?

Diary of a Large Girl

In a politically correct world, there is small, average and large. Large is a figment of the mind more than anything else. It can be used to judge you only as much as you judge yourself

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