Minnu Mani: The story from Choimoola to Dhaka A thick bouquet of artificial roses lies blissfully on the creaky armchair in the corner of the narrow drawing room. A tired Minnu Mani tucks the bouquet into the plywood shelf beneath the glass showcase where her trophies glimmer, drags the chair through the freshly-polished floor, and coils into the chair. As she buries her face into her palms, her father, Mani, runs his palms through her hair and says, more as an aside, “She is tired.” READ MORE Kohrra actor Suvinder Vicky: ‘Be it the santaap of 1984 or the pain of Partition, Punjab is in my blood’ With his ready laughter, Suvinder Vicky is quite unlike Inspector Balbir Singh, the brooding, grey-bearded Punjab Police cop whose silence speaks volumes in the recent Netflix series Kohrra. In real life, Vicky enjoys a good chat. In fact, he doesn’t mind pouring his heart out to a stranger in quite the same way as he does into his characters. “That’s what acting is all about,’’ says the man who has spent a lifetime immersed in the art. READ MORE Despite sporadic outbursts of violence, Internal Security in India: Violence, Order and The State reveals how most forms of violence are on a downward slide in India Most of us rely on social media, television, newspapers and conversations with our friends to get a sense of what is happening in the world around us. News, however, suffers from a systematic negativity bias — the bad and the abnormal get more coverage than the good and the normal. In addition, our minds tend to confuse the frequency of news items with its actual prevalence. Then there are regular moral panics and outrage cycles, all of which end up giving us a distorted perception of the state of the world, often making us anxious, depressed and despondent. READ MORE In the backdrop of continuing violence against women, Dutch scholar Mineke Schipper’s Hills of Paradise urges readers to remember and resist I begin with a confession. I got my hands upon Mineke Schipper’s Hills of Paradise earlier this month, but only got the chance to read it when the world seemed to have turned a little more cruel and a lot more violent towards women. READ MORE Freelance journalist Neelam Gupta's Gaav ke Rashtrashipikar documents the fascinating outcome of a unique social-empowerment course offered by a Gujarat university In 2007, a young Jaldeep Thakar enrolled himself in the two-year Gramshilpi programme of the Gujarat Vidyapith (GV) upon the suggestion of a friend. For Thakar, it was meant to be just a two-year-long experiment as he had several lucrative job offers waiting for him. But after just two months of working in Pedhamali village in Gujarat’s Mehsana district, Thakar realised that not even two lives were enough to complete the work. READ MORE Can campaigns like Just Stop Oil achieve their real purpose if they fail to draw mass attention to it? I don’t know quite what to make of the ‘Just Stop Oil’ protests going on in Europe and the UK recently. Groups of orange-clad protestors, linking arms and standing across roads and motorways blocking traffic. Or working in pairs or small numbers, disfiguring classic works of art in museums and interrupting major sporting events, like the recently-concluded Wimbledon. READ MORE Punjabi writer Charan Singh Shaheed’s satirical poems get a new lease of life with an English translation Majestic Musings: Poems of Humour and Satire is a collection of poems by Punjabi writer Charan Singh Shaheed, newly translated to English from the original Gurumukhi by his great-granddaughter and journalist Sunanda Beecha Mehta, former resident editor of The Indian Express, Pune. It has been illustrated by Aditi Deo. READ MORE
