On New Year’s Eve, the globalised custom dictates that we make some good resolutions. Believe me, though, in most cases such resolutions turn out to be like toilet paper—the slightest touch of water dilutes them irreversibly. Instead, I think it
The Internet has not been kind to Pahlaj Nihalani. As chief of the censor board, Nihalani has been at the center of controversy after controversy. First, it was his very appointment to that position, which was seen as one
Refugee is a political term, connected to, but not quite the same as, a person seeking refuge. The term ‘refugee’ is inseparably connected with international borders and internal strife in the country of one’s birth. In the 1951 Refugee Convention,
Come this May, it will have been a decade for me, living in this big city. Ten years since university, ten years since moving to neighbourhoods larger than my whole district, ten years of navigations and heartbreaks and loves and
“See how your world has cracked. Why aren’t you here? Where are you? Come back. … Is history deaf there, across the oceans?” —Agha Shahid Ali, A Pastoral To talk about the act of migration is to speak
I Farid Ahmad looks upon me with polite contempt. He greets me when I am introduced to him at the camp for Rohingya refugees at Balapur, a suburb of Hyderabad, with an affable as-salamu alaikum, but once he finds out
“We do not care— That much is clear. Not enough Of us care Anywhere. We are not wise— For that reason, Mankind dies. To think Is much against The will. Better— And easier— To kill.” —Langston Hughes, ‘Wisdom And
I In early April last year, 32-year-old Amuri Djuma was attacked outside his small furniture store in Isipingo, south of Durban. A group of men raided his store and looted most of the goods, leaving him financially devastated and homeless.
Around a shabby table in a sports centre of a university, an interpreter, a civil servant and a humanitarian worker—myself—have dinner with the residents of a temporary refugee camp. Rock-hard bread, cheap cheese, plastic knives. Germany in October 2015. Since
I ready Skype in anticipation. I want this interview to go well. Anders Lustgarten has become somewhat of a hero for me, after I heard his Soho Theatre play, Lampedusa, on the radio. After a couple of initial glitches, I’m