In the fraught times that the Indian republic is passing through, it is a year when Indian cinema turned away from storytelling that defends and celebrates justice, equality, freedom and kindness. Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty As I sit down surrounded by the winter chill for my annual letter to The Wire about my favourite Indian films of…
Mander, who based his story on a real person, has said it is disappointing that the government agency is now going after his story and asking for its removal Representative image of Odisha during a cyclone. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Rights activist Harsh Mander wrote ‘Weathering the Storm in Erasma’, a short story for children, after…
Every second Indian was born and raised in times of aggressive majoritarianism, and also in neoliberal India, with no memory of another country, as it was imagined, and imperfectly lived. A survivor stands inside his house that was burnt and damaged in the Godhra riots during the commemoration of its 10th anniversary, in Ahmedabad February…
Our leaders have taken India to the very edge of the abyss. My desperate hope is only that enough of us don’t shut down our conscience. Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty Genocide attempts to destroy a people, in whole or in part. Is India in danger of being engulfed in a genocidal bloodbath? Is genocide inherent in…
Unsurprisingly, many of the best films of the year were meditations about death and loss, but also about inequality, oppression and resistance. The year that we leave behind us was, in many ways, more calamitous than what most of us would have witnessed in a lifetime. It was a year in which death and…