Sunday Long Reads: Bollywood’s portrayal of cops, Northeast’s relationship with mainland, and more

Actually, the sequence belongs to the 2004 film Ab Tak Chhappan, starring Nana Patekar and directed by Shimit Amin. Patekar’s character was modelled on Daya Nayak, a real-life cop who had made a name for himself as an “encounter specialist”, having scalped 56 mobsters. The details may differ, but in spirit, the incident in UP’s rural outpost was startlingly similar: the custodial death of a criminal, in which the accompanying police detail was the only witness.

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Imagine: Why it’s time to stand up to anxiety

Anxiety also tricks us into believing that there is something wrong with us — that we are not smart enough, not worthy enough or maybe just not trying hard enough. (Source: Getty Images)

It is like static, playing in the background all the time!” This is how 17-year-old Sanvi described anxiety to me. It had started as a “whisper” but now the “static” had mutated into a “banshee”, screeching at her that COVID-19 would kill her elderly grandmother, that her father would lose his job and they would be thrown out of their house and then she would not be able to go to college!

I know we all might roll our eyes at Sanvi’s catastrophisation, but we are all entertaining some form of anxiety “static” in our lives. What if we were to put anxiety in a petri-dish to see what makes it thrive or Ripen (acronym)?

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Why snails have a complicated courtship

Love actually: Snails have a complicated courtship (Image courtesy: Ranjit Lal)

This is the time of the year when they emerge from their underground lairs or from behind the bark of tree trunks and hollows. They crawl slowly (like everything else they do), leaving behind a silvery trail of what looks like snot. Their four feelers wave in the air — the longer ones on top are pinpointed with a pair of eyes (that don’t see too well), while the bottom pair searches out the delectable perfume of a prospective partner, and feels around the ground.

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How Begum Akhtar once rode the vintage Minerva which won at global Concours Virtual 2020

Old and gold: Diljeet Titus with the 1933 Minerva Type AL that won the People’s Vote award in the Cars of the Art Deco Era category at Concours Virtual 2020. (Photo: Diljeet Titus)

Mohammad Amir Ahmad Khan (1914-73) was 19 years old, on a Europe tour with his father, the then Raja of Mahmudabad, when he saw the 1933 Minerva Type AL Landaulette at a show in Paris. The future raja ended up splurging on the Belgian-make car. As a great patron of Begum Akhtar, he would later regularly send the car to bring the doyen of Hindustani classical music from Lucknow to the Mahmudabad palace, not very far from the capital city. This week, the car won the People’s Vote award in the Cars of the Art Deco Era category at the first-ever global Concours Virtual, and its current owner Diljeet Titus is eager to tell its story. This is its first international win, after two Indian wins at 21 Gun Salute international Concours show and the now-discontinued Cartier Concours d’Elegance.

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What hopes and impediments punctuate the NE-mainland roadmap

A file photo of women in Lunghar village of Ukhrul district, Manipur, taking a break as they trek home after casting their votes in the 2019 general elections. (Source: Express Archive)

This is a rare gem of a book. The changing, and, at times, unchanging relationship of New Delhi with the states and peoples of the Northeast have rarely found so thoughtful an analyst. While grappling with contentious issues of present politics, Sanjib Baruah provides depth, context and perspective.

Assam looms large in the history and future of the region, and not only because it accounts for nearly 70 per cent of the population. Earlier, the Lushai and Naga Hills were part of unified Assam, as were the areas which were made part of the new state of Meghalaya in 1972. The author reminds us of how the outer perimeter of the Raj included princely states, and two, Manipur and Tripura, had agents of the Crown who reported to the Governor of Assam. In the 1950 Constitution, the head of the state of Assam retained special powers in the Sixth Schedule areas. Here, the older imperial power structure in the hill and tribal areas was grafted onto a republican constitutional system.

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Why Megha Majumdar’s much talked about debut novel fails to live up to its promise

A Burning, by Megha Majumdar; Alfred A Knopf/Penguin Hamish Hamilton; 304 pages; Rs 599

To start with, the name of her protagonist. Jivan is the only daughter of an impoverished Muslim couple, whose names we are never told. Nor the circumstances in which they chose an oddly-north-Indian/Hindu sounding name for their daughter. They live in a slum near a landfill in a city which is probably Kolkata, having been displaced from their village by a development project. Despite the grim odds, Jivan catches a few breaks – admission to a private school under a quota for the underprivileged and, later, a job at Pantaloons – and is working her way to her dream of a middle-class life. She is the poster girl of “modern” Indian aspiration, whose promise and discontents have been the subject of novels like Vikas Swarup’s Q&A (2006) and Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger (2008).

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‘My engagement with gender and caste comes from my experience as a woman in an upper-caste household’

Dreaming big: Kritika Pandey on her short story that won Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

When the news of her Commonwealth Short Story Prize win reached her, Kritika Pandey says she was rather taken aback. This was the third year that she’d entered the contest, open to unpublished writers from Commonwealth nations, and she’d not gone beyond the shortlist in previous years. “This time, I did not even have butterflies in my stomach,” she says, during a long-distance conversation from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, US, where she has just completed an MFA course. Pandey’s short story, ‘The Great Indian Tee and Snakes’, on a short-lived friendship between a Hindu girl and a Muslim boy in a communally-charged India, not only emerged as the Asia winner but also the overall winner of the competition. In this interview, Pandey, 29, speaks about what set her off on the story and how reading changed her world.

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