These are times of global disquiet. Gales of hatred and bigotry are sweeping country after country around the world. After Donald Trump’s emphatic and stunning electoral success to the office of the president of the US, I wrote this mail to many American friends:
It would be hard to find a building more burdened with suffering and memory in all of Delhi. And yet, if you walked past it, you would hardly turn your head to look at it again. There was nothing that distinguished it from the tens of thousands of other urban cages anywhere in the country.
Tushar, the son of a police officer in Haryana, studied at University of Pennsylvania and worked for three years as an investment banker in the United States and Singapore. Matt migrated as a teenager to the United States with his parents, and studied in MIT.
It is highly unfortunate that the NHRC report plays into the communal stereotype that dates back to Partition — of Muslim young men sexually harassing Hindu girls.
On September 7 2013, a gale of hate violence hit districts of western Uttar Pradesh, destroying and displacing thousands. Three years later, the large majority of these hate refugees remain exiled permanently from the villages of their birth, painfully rebuilding their lives in small makeshift colonies.
A middle-aged man who repairs shoes on a street corner in Ahmedabad and who has slept for many years on the pavements of the city is one among the hundreds who joined the Azadi Kooch, the protest march from Ahmedabad to Una village in Gir Somnath district against the public lashing of Dalit men for skinning a dead cow.
Irom Sharmila holds a press conference after breaking her fast in Imphal, north-eastern Indian state of Manipur. Earlier on Tuesday, a judge had granted her bail after she assured him that she planned to end her fast.
Home-based work absolves the owners and managers of global supply chains from any legal obligations of fair wages, healthy work conditions and social protection to the actual end-line workers who labour in isolated home-based units.
There is one memory that Tauseef Hussain, now in his twenties, still cherishes of his grandfather Ehsan Jafri. When he visited Jafri in Ahmedabad from the United States with his mother, Jafri’s daughter, during summer vacations, he would have to sit in Jafri’s library in the stifling summer heat.
On the wall is a painting of a beaming Rohith Vemula. Below his face is a poignant engraving: 1989-Forever. Under the painting on the floor are sprawled around 20 mattresses, on which groups of students sit in clusters, work on their laptops, or stretch out listlessly.