Grammar of the Void – Book Review
Grammar of the Void is a debut that earns its ambitions. From the quiet nos
Joburg, Five Days, Zero Regrets
Johannesburg had always been a warning in other people’s stories: crime s
The Centrifugal Soul: Finding Your “Centre” in a Simulated World
In a world of endless scrolling and algorithm-driven identities, we risk lo
MOTHER – A Love That Never Left
A heartfelt Mother’s Day tribute to a remarkable mother, an educator, a f
Habba Kadal, And Everything After
Some heroes do not arrive with noise or ceremony. They wake before the hous
Of Flights, Familiarity and Fusion
A tender, witty memoir of travel and exile, this essay follows Mridula Kaul
In Focus
‘The Kashmir Files’ and The ‘P’ word
The word "propaganda" gets thrown around a lot these days, but rarely with the weight of history behind it. The recent release of Dhurandhar has reignited a familiar debate, one that almost always circles back to The Kashmir Files. What began as intellectual posturing for some has now become a kind of reflex: have a mic, will call it propaganda. Yet many Kashmiris, people with living memory of January 19, 1990, have been earnestly sharing their testimonies, only to be dismissed. Documented events include the mass exodus, the killings of B.K. Ganjoo, Girja Ticku, Sarwanand Premi and his son, and the Nadimarg massacre of 24 civilians. These are police-recorded facts, not cinematic liberties. You may critique the filmmaking, but documented history is not subject to taste. And as one survivor puts it plainly: we did not leave Kashmir because of the weather.
Editor's Desk
The Places That Vanish
For more than 4,000 years, civilisations chose Failaka Island in Kuwait's Persian Gulf, not by accident but by design. By the 20th century it had become something gentler: a weekend retreat where families crossed the water on Friday mornings, children ran straight into the sea and dolphins moved through the shallows just offshore. Then Iraqi forces arrived in August 1990, expelled its 2,000 residents within days and systematically erased what had taken millennia to build. Walking those ruins in 2004 beside Neda, a woman returning for the first time since the invasion, I began to understand something that GDP figures and oil well recovery statistics cannot capture: the price of conflict is not measured in barrels. It is measured in people who can no longer claim what was rightfully theirs.
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