True Life

The Professional Sex Writer

Sandhya Mulchandani

All eyes turn to her at parties, her husband thinks she writes porn and her friends expect her to diagnose what’s wrong with their husbands. This, Sandhya Mulchandani says, is what happens when you know stuff like the Sanskrit word for the G-spot

Nowhere Girl

Sara Rahbar

At the age of five, Sara Rahbar fled the Islamic revolution in Iran, walking through knee-deep snow and hiding in caves. Years later, she returned, only to realise that we are all in exile in a way

The Man Who Doesn’t Ask for Money

Vinod Sreedhar

Money makes him uncomfortable, so Vinod Sreedhar refuses to charge for his workshops. He accepts whatever people want to pay. He trusts the universe to provide for him. Here he is, in his own words

The Dancing Engineer

Sohini Chattopadhyay

A self-taught dancer, Harihar Dash is the boy you can’t take your eyes off in a jazzy new TV commercial. Open traces the unreal career graph of the engineer from Behrampore

Amma, Superstar

Vamsee Juluri

Children are named after him, fans were sometimes pacified by his darshan, and he worried Kamal Haasan might slay his mother. Vamsee Juluri on growing up as the son of Telugu superstar Jamuna

The River Rider

Jaideep Mazumdar

The Amazon, Ganga and Brahmaputra are not enough for Andy Leeman. Having sailed six rivers across the world, he now has his sights set on the Yangtze in China. Open meets the tireless river campaigner

‘Sedition’ as Tyranny

Rati Rao

Dr Rati Rao, vice-president of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, Karnataka, received a police notice on 26 February informing her that a case of sedition (Section 124-A) had been registered against her for publishing a bulletin that the complaint alleged was ‘favouring Naxals and Muslims’ and ‘propagating that the police are killing innocent people in the name of encounters’. She spent the next nine months realising how the State had exacted its punishment, even though no chargesheet was filed against her.