COVER STORY
A personal account of torture by security forces led to a play depicting the horrors of a draconian law
Outlook Magazine - 17 January 2022
‘Normal’ is not a state of life in the Kashmir valley. It’s a shiny factoid woven into every movement, manufactured in a post-truth world.
Snapshots of Patna seen through photographs—people, places and poetry
According to the oral tradition of the Ao Nagas, there were some special men and women who were endowed with powers to read the future. They were called Arasentsür and the most common practice among them was to shred the leaf called ‘Aam’ (phyrinium pubescence) in order to predict futures and also to prescribe appropriate rituals as curatives for different diseases.
Make no mistake, these are the best times for comedy, humour and satire. A comic will speak till the cows come home. Try stopping and you shall be the next joke.
Critically dependant on remittances from the Gulf, Kerala’s economy is staring at an abyss after lakhs returned home following Covid lockdowns
My apocalypse came in images—an abandoned horse, a body wrapped in plastic and the story of a professor who was making a curriculum of darkness
Poetry by Rohith, a doctor and poet from Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh
‘Non-human’ entities rule our world. And we are mere puppets in the Great Game.
A story written for 'Outlook'. Translated from the original in Tamil by Kavitha Muralidharan.
‘Normal’ is not a state of life in the Kashmir valley. It’s a shiny factoid woven into every movement, manufactured in a post-truth world.
Snapshots of Patna seen through photographs—people, places and poetry
According to the oral tradition of the Ao Nagas, there were some special men and women who were endowed with powers to read the future. They were called Arasentsür and the most common practice among them was to shred the leaf called ‘Aam’ (phyrinium pubescence) in order to predict futures and also to prescribe appropriate rituals as curatives for different diseases.
Make no mistake, these are the best times for comedy, humour and satire. A comic will speak till the cows come home. Try stopping and you shall be the next joke.
Critically dependant on remittances from the Gulf, Kerala’s economy is staring at an abyss after lakhs returned home following Covid lockdowns
My apocalypse came in images—an abandoned horse, a body wrapped in plastic and the story of a professor who was making a curriculum of darkness
Poetry by Rohith, a doctor and poet from Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh
‘Non-human’ entities rule our world. And we are mere puppets in the Great Game.
A story written for 'Outlook'. Translated from the original in Tamil by Kavitha Muralidharan.
OTHER STORIES
How will the world end? With a whimper, as Eliot predicted? Or in a yawn, as Pope said it would.
In this anniversary and year-end issue combined, Outlook looks at a range of stories of hope, despair and redemption. We delve into this apocalyptic version of the new world.
The internet has certainly liberated news. But it negates the training of a correspondent, the endless discussion in news meetings, the polishing of copy and fact-checking by the desk.
Station Eleven might be the only pandemic-related TV show which portrays loss with such sincerity—a narrative of unspoken grief
The Covid-19 pandemic exposed India’s stark inequalities like never before
Over the past two years, Covid rendered spectator sports—that symbol of civilisational normality—into a battleground of perception
The pandemic taught the world to battle emptiness and also to seek the meaning of life and love in the people around them
Looking for solitude while playing fastest finger first in a world of social media rules
The sufferings of migrant workers have become the most rivetingly tragic tale of our times
Dalits have been forced to handle the dead for centuries. The manner in which they are compelled to handle the bodies in modern, state-run hospitals, have gone unnoticed and undocumented.
If anything will save us, it will be empathy and love in our darkest days
How zombie films, or almost-zombie films, have dealt with apocalypse, social crisis and personal desolation
Artistes are a fragile species who need constant reaffirmation and cultural validation
Our planet remains inexhaustible, as inexhaustible as our capacity for instruction and exploration.
You remain hopeful some judge will see through the absurdity of the charges. You also caution yourself about the perils of nurturing such hopes, writes Umar Khalid after spending 15 months in Tihar jail as an undertrial.
It’s not just planetary crisis but the destruction of the individual too
There is going to be no 'pralay' as we have imagined in our conceptions of the apocalypse as a single mythic event.
