mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Writer of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays, films and keen on all sorts of inter-genre literary experiments.
Author of 'The Comeback', 'City of Incident'; 'Prelude to a Riot'; 'Bread, Cement, Cactus: A memoir of belonging and dislocation', 'Gulab'; 'Love Stories # 1 to 14'; 'Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales'.
Co-author of 'The Good Indian Girl'; 'Crush'; 'The Almost Drizzles of May'.
Editor of 'Unbound: 2000 Years of Indian Women's Writing' and 'Equal Halves'.
"Ambedkar Jayanti is organised around the memory of a modern thinker who stood for equality, justice, education and dignity. The celebration honours Ambedkar not as a religious figure, but as the architect of the Constitution and as a leader who fought against caste oppression. In that sense, Ambedkar Jayanti has created a different language of public celebration"
https://m.thewire.in/article/caste/the-importance-of-publicly-celebrating-ambedkar-jayanti
"while the average height of people across the world is increasing, the average height of Indians is actually falling.
The paper examines the trends in the heights of Indian men and women between the age groups of 15-25 and 26-50...Height is one of the most basic indicators of nutrition as well as public health and is directly linked to a country’s standard of living. It also reflects social and economic factors such as income and caste..."
"For decades, a popular argument has circulated in Indian policy debates: That poverty has no caste, that a poor man is a poor man regardless of his social identity, and that economic uplift alone is sufficient to address inequality... now put that argument to an empirical test. The answer is unambiguous. Poverty... is structurally, systematically and measurably aligned with social identity."
"Nikita Naidu is an Indian climate activist. She is also, she says, a person who finally ran out of reasons to stay home. “There is no climate justice without social justice... until we first address the socioeconomic conditions of any group of people, we cannot really fix climate change, whether it is adaptation measures or mitigation measures.”... she was about to fly to Tripoli, Libya — the starting point of the overland leg of the Global Sumud Flotilla"
"the Indian government announced a 20-year tax holiday for foreign cloud service companies using India-based data centers to serve global customers. The move is aimed at positioning India as a global hub for artificial intelligence...
However, their existing data center projects in the country are running into roadblocks.
Google and Microsoft are both facing pushback... Farmers have said they are being pressured to give up land"
"India is the third-largest e-waste generator globally, producing almost 2 million tons of e-waste in 2024 — a 73% increase over five years. While people like me are part of the problem, the major culprits are actually halfway across the world.
Almost 70% of the e-waste generated in India comes from abroad. The U.S. is the number one origin country for e-waste shipments going to developing countries"
"Irfan Mehraj, editor of Wande magazine was arrested on March 20, 2023, on charges under UAPA. The trial is yet to begin...A report by BBC points out how it is very common for a journalist to be summoned by the police over reports they have written and to be detained. Others are summoned for what is said to be “routine background checks.” The police though warn journalists during these checks that the surveillance is being extended to... families and siblings"
"Registered factories averaged 1,109 deaths and over 4,000 injuries annually between 2017 and 2020, according to an RTI filed by IndiaSpend with union labour ministry’s Directorate General Factory Advice Service & Labour Institutes (DGFASLI) in November 2022 data. Boiler explosions rank among the leading causes of industrial disaster in India—yet media coverage tends to focus on casualties rather than the regulatory failures and missed warnings that precede them"
https://article-14.com/post/how-adivasi-migrants-keep-ahmedabad-s-textile-boilers-and-a-billion-dollar-indian-industry-running-69f2cd2663f7b
"Korean prisoners of war in the 1950s were subjected to early MK-ULTRA experiments while in American custody, according to recently declassified CIA documents which confirm these experiments for the first time...memo includes detailed plans for interrogation teams trained to utilize the polygraph, various drugs, and hypnotism “for personality control purposes.”
"As per the Minimum Wages Act, state governments are mandated to revise the minimum wages at least every five years. But both Uttar Pradesh and Haryana governments, where workers in the industrial areas around the national capital went on large strikes earlier this month, had not revised the minimum wages in over 10 years."
https://themigrationstory.com/post/our-wages-were-stolen-and-we-forced-a-correction/
"Rudolph went on to explain how his firm, First Wap, could provide sophisticated phone-tracking software capable of pinpointing any person in the world. The potential buyer? A private mining company, owned by an individual under sanction, who intended to use it to surveil environmental protesters."
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/04/cellphone-surveillance-firstwap-reports-lighthouse/
"1 mega watt (MW) of data centre capacity requires one acre of land and Rs 70 crore in investment. Each mega watt demands 25 million litres... If you ask five questions on ChatGPT, 500 ml of water is needed," Priyank told legislators...
Data centres are large facilities that house the servers, storage systems, and networking equipment that power everything from cloud computing to artificial intelligence... Karnataka has 32 private data centres... 31 are in Bengaluru."
"Not all of us must wait in line to have our dying relatives admitted to hospital or wait indefinitely to get a government-issued card that gives access to subsidised grains...But some of us do. And that difference, between those who wait and those who do not, is not merely a difference of luck or of temperament or even of effort. It is a difference written into the architecture of Indian cities. It is, if we are prepared to call it what it is... structural violence"
"One person displaced every 25 minutes, 24 hours a day, for nearly five years. The vast majority of those evicted are Bengali-speaking Muslims...Between May 2021 and 2026, the government in Assam, in far northeastern India, conducted at least 33 documented eviction operations. More than 22,000 structures, mostly homes, have been demolished, and 20,387 families were evicted...
an increasingly institutionalised campaign of dispossession"
"Over 60 Indian pharmaceutical suppliers have exported synthetic opioid pills worth almost Rs 1,220 crore – or US $130 million – to West African nations. Most of the destination countries had not approved the drug, and have an opioid abuse problem.
These pills contained tapentadol, classified as a psychotropic substance in India and five times more potent than intravenous morphine."
"During the recent U.S.-Israel war on Iran, AI was used to identify and strike targets, accelerate the speed of attacks, and get weaponry recommendations. Far from the conflict zones, AI also enabled the creation and spread of disinformation and deepfakes that confused public opinion and made it hard to understand on-ground realities."
https://restofworld.org/2026/deepfakes-ai-war-disinformation/?utm_campaign=row-social
"The court heard that during the attack, Ashby subjected his victim to a tirade of anti-Muslim abuse, wrongly believing her to be of that faith.
Ashby was arrested in the Perry Barr area of Birmingham two days later.
During a police interview, when shown a photograph of the victim and asked whether he knew her, he asked why she was not wearing a hijab, the jury was told"
