Bombay is better than Calcutta: Impressions of a US novelist in early 20th-century India

This Article First Appeared In The Scroll On Sep 15, 2023 As a lifelong journalist, Edgar Watson Howe was well aware of what curious newspaper readers in smalltown America were looking for when reading about other parts of the world. A son of a Nebraska abolitionist who fought against the Confederates in the American Civil War, Howe entered the world of journalism at the age of 19 and tried (with limited success) to write novels. By the time he was journeying through India, he had developed a unique style of travel writing that drew comparisons between the landscapes of the United States with those of the countries he was visiting. India, though, left a whole variety of impressions on him, which he neatly documented in the Lincoln Nebraska State Journal.

15 Reads

• 
• 
• 
• 

Turkish President Erdogan Talks ‘Peace in Kashmir’ at UN General Assembly

This Article First Appeared In The Quint On Sept 20, 2023 During the high-level 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly session in New York on Tuesday, 19 September, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke of Kashmir during his address to world leaders. "Another development that will pave the way for regional peace, stability and prosperity in South Asia will be the establishment of a just and lasting peace in Kashmir through dialogue and cooperation between India and Pakistan,” Erdogan said in his address to the General Debate on Tuesday.

15 Reads

• 
• 
• 
• 

How the Chakhesang Naga community weaves a world of meaning into a shawl

This Article First Appeared In The Scroll On Sep 13, 2023 This vivid excerpt is from Naga Path, the memoir of the British anthropologist and World War II guerrilla Ursula Bower Graham, who documented the lives and labours of Naga communities in the 1930s and ’40s. Though her description of a weaving centre is almost a century old, the art of weaving remains a significant aspect of the culture and identity of the Naga people. “For the Nagas…textiles are not simply cloths but are repositories of world views, meanings, and narratives….[and] bear much of the community’s ideologies, values and beliefs in tangible form…,” writes Thingminao Horam, a doctoral scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in her 2021 essay Weaving Resistance and Identity: Politics of Contemporary Textile Practice of the Tangkhuls.

15 Reads

• 
• 
• 
• 

Project Elephant and Tiger: A Fresh Look at Terrestrial Conservation?

(This Article First Appeared In The Quint On Sept 14, 2023)

• There needs to be a paradigm shift in the tiger-and-elephant-centric mindset of officers in charge of the new PTE. The concept of ‘Umbrella Species’ took flight in the 1980s when biodiversity conservation strategies were being discussed. Soon, the tiger in India was overwhelmingly considered an Umbrella Species that, if protected, would also conserve a host of other organisms and their habitats just as an umbrella would prevent everything under its coverage area from getting wet in the rain...

15 Reads

• 
• 
• 
• 

Narendra Modi’s New New Delhi

This Article First Appeared In The Newyorker  On Sept 7, 2023. Earlier this year, I joined Jawhar Sircar, a member of the Indian Parliament, on his short commute to work. He and his fellow-M.P.s lodge in a state-owned apartment complex on a prime lot of what the locals call Lutyens’s Delhi, in honor of the British architect Edwin Lutyens, who designed the heart of the Indian capital a century ago. When I arrived, a security officer was washing dishes in a hose-fed basin beside a green military tent that had been pitched in the courtyard. Just across the street, the core government and cultural institutions of the world’s largest democracy stretched out along the Central Vista, a nearly two-mile-long green space that Lutyens developed in emulation of Washington, D.C.,’s National Mall.

15 Reads

• 
• 
• 
• 

Russian President Putin praises PM Modi, ‘We should learn from our partner India’

This Article First Appeared In Mint On Sept 13, 2023

• Russian President Vladimir Putin praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi's promotion of the "Make in India" programme. He highlighted the importance of using domestically made product and commended India's policies under PM Modi's leadership as a positive example...

15 Reads

• 
• 
• 
•