Arundhati Roy: A Troublemaker Needed for our Troubled Times
Arundhati Roy’s storytelling illuminates the desires to split open the human grids that characterize our world, and fulfil her yearning for a particular kind of homeland: a gentler, stiller, less hypocritical, and less transactional place. By Saba Karim Khan
Mass Entertainment Outrage
From Paatal Lok and Leila to A Suitable Boy and Deepika Padukone’s films, Indian movies and web series face targeted attacks from the outraged right-wing, hell-bent to shape the national narrative to their own terms. Is there a way forward for true creative voices to survive in the mainstream? By Karan Madhok
Poems by Aardhra Chandran: ‘Concrete trucks rumble past his fence, shaking the loose teeth / in his jaw, spitting black diesel smoke onto his holy basil plant. // He measures his life not in years, but in missing trees—/The neem chopped for wood, the mango that died of thirst.’