© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan is about a woman who travels from Earth to the culturally snobbish Primus, a planet that’s hosting the biggest cooking show in the galaxy. She has been invited but has an uphill battle to fight in terms of xenophobia to Earthlings, her insecurity about the primitive cooking methods used on Earth (fire), and the technocratic corporate honcho she begins to fall for against all odds.
Unmoored by Ramachandran Usha and translated from the Tamil by Krupa Ge is the titular novella in this collection about women, freedom and money. It tells the story of three women who return to Chennai from the Gulf in search of families they left behind to secure financial stability. But things have changed and money can’t buy time. The other stories in the volume, ‘Khushka’ and ‘Success’, explore similar territory.
Society Girl by Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood is a true story from October 1970 when ‘phones began ringing all over Karachi’ due to a sensational news break that would go on to dominate Pakistani headlines for years to come. Poet and ex-civil servant Mustafa Zaidi was found dead in his bedroom with his love affair, Shahnaz Gul, a married socialite, unconscious in the next room. The authors revisit this story and unravel the obsession around it.
Indians on the Move by Indrajit Roy, Zaheeb Ajmal and Ankur Jaiswal is an intimate account of one of the largest internal migrations in Indian history, when Prime Minister Modi imposed a nation-wide lockdown in 2020 due to COVID-19, with hours of notice, driving away millions of migrant workers from the cities they had come to for better opportunities, deprived of security nets in the economies they had helped build from the ground-up.
Revolution Within by TK Anandi is an account of the reforms that have taken place in Nampudiri Brahmin households, one of the most dominant caste groups in Kerala, and the role played by young people and women in spearheading those changes. It also discusses norms of inheritance, marriage and reproduction in the households, as well as disruptions that contributed to the state’s larger progressive movements.
