We mounted the stairs of the tranquil 200-year-old Noorani mosque in West Bengal’s coal city of Asansol with trepidation. What could you say to a man who had just lost his 16-year-old son to a hate mob that would give him any kind of solace?
It was night by the time our weary and dusty band of travellers in Karwan e Mohabbat reached the seminary near Satna, Madhya Pradesh, where young prospective Catholic priests spend several years studying theology.
The election results in Brazil last month came as another troubling reminder of the direction in which an increasing number of countries are careening.
Uzma was born on the terrifying night when her father was shot dead on the banks of a canal by paramilitary soldiers, about 50-odd km from Delhi. This was in the summer of 1987.
The first day of the Karwan e Mohabbat (caravan of love) in Odisha revealed a state torn apart by the same ruptures of communal and caste mobilisation against religious minorities and disadvantaged castes that lacerate many parts of the country.
During the two decades that I served in the Indian Administrative Service, I would often wonder why our country’s founding fathers and mothers chose to retain in democratic India the permanent civil services patterned closely after the colonial civil services
I held Rakbar Khan’s father Suleiman’s hand in mine for a long time. His face was creased with grief, his eyes often welled up.
Dr Arshad Hussain, professor of Psychiatry, Institute of Mental Health & Neurosciences (IMHANS), Srinagar, has been observing the mental health of the general population in the Valley in a situation of conflict from the early 1990s, when he was just a medical student.