Essays

The Final Frontier

Open

If 30 years of foreign policy could be rewound, Pakistan’s ‘jihad factory’ would not exist, says Alice Albinia

Silence, Please

Elizabeth Kuruvilla

The story of an artist who has lived most of his life in deafness but still can’t afford to listen.

Pune teenager Krushnaa Patil climbed Mt Everest recently and spent half an hour on top of the world. But strangely, it wasn’t quite the whoohoo moment she thought it would be. Her Everest moment had come a little before the summit...

Spice of Life

Jayant Kamicheril

He loved the quiet life in Kerala: the settled job, the quaint club with a pool full of frogs, perhaps even the growing paunch. Now, he explains the physics of arranged marriages to Yanks. Besides selling spices, that is

A Muse I Have No Use for

Hartosh Singh Bal

He suffers from amusia and can’t tell the difference between the national anthem and Beethoven’s Fifth

Rhyme and Treason

Vivek Narayanan

In these times when success is determined by numbers, poetry is a marginal mode of communication. Perhaps what the poet should look for is the intensity of his readership, not its size

In Memory of Mayawati

Gautam Bhatia

If an etching of her presence on the template of history is what she wanted, that’s all she’ll have got at the end. Here’s how we’ll remember her

Why Sex is Divine

Charu Bahri

There’s more to the erotic imagery at the Khajuraho temples than a wanton display of lust. The author reveals the architectural logic for these sacred sculptures