Features

The Vanishing Government School: Caste, Class, and the Quiet Dismantling of India’s Public Education Promise

Dr Md Tabrez Alam The debate over school closures is not about infrastructure alone. It is about deciding whose children deserve a neighbourhood school and whose education can be sacrificed in the name of efficiency and reform. Abstract: Over the past decade, India has witnessed the closure or merger of more than 93,000 government schools—a …

Features

Cockroaches to Reservations: The Old Politics of Caste Denial in a New Avatar

Himadri Sekhar Mistri A Familiar Script, A New Hashtag In India, after any genuinely popular protest, something predictable happens: its language is borrowed, and its momentum diverted to other causes that have little to do with its original politics. This is what seems to have happened after the month-long agitation by the Cockroach Janta Party …

Assertion

We Are Not Your Little Anything: On the Portrayal of Mizoram and the Ethics of Being Seen

Duhaisami Tochhawng You scroll through a reel of Aizawl at dusk. The camera pans across the ridge. Terraced houses cling to the slope, holding on the way our houses do because our land is nearly vertical and there is nowhere else for them to sit. The light is soft. The audio is Japanese, likely a …

Features

Beyond the Gold Controversy: Appropriation and the Historical Making of Sabarimala

Rasni Bai Abstract: The recent controversy surrounding the alleged theft of gold at the Sabarimala temple has largely been discussed as an instance of administrative failure or criminal misconduct. This essay approaches the controversy differently. Rather than investigating the alleged theft itself, it uses the episode as a contemporary point of departure to examine the …

Features

Oppenheimer in Hiroshima, Odyssey in Gaza

Umar Nizar The near-hysterical reception that accompanies the release of a Christopher Nolan film has no exceptions. `Odyssey’, his latest flick to hit the screens, has succeeded in a way that would be envious to many, to say the least. The movie has found a huge audience, and also has become a talking point or …

Features

Does Ambedkar Posthumously Have a ‘Homeland’?

Manoj Bag In August 1931, during his first formal meeting with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi at Mani Bhavan in Bombay, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar made a declaration that fundamentally shattered the nationalist illusion of a unified anti-colonial front: “Gandhiji, I have no homeland.” To grasp the profound weight of this statement, one must first interrogate what it …

Features

‘Main Wapas Aavunga’ Symphonies of Sorrow, Silences of Caste

Mahesh Admankar Main Wapas Aavunga is an emotionally resonant masterpiece—one that approaches the staggering tragedy of the 1947 Partition not through explosive political grandstanding, but through the quiet, devastating power of human intimacy. The film anchors the historical trauma of millions onto the fragile shoulders of an elderly Sikh man in his nineties. Haunted by …