Weekend Reads

  1. “The BJP government has, in fact, slowly evolved into something surprisingly similar to its Congress-led predecessor, from which Mr Modi promised to “free” India”, says the Caravan.
  2. A sample of panel guests on prime-time television on Indian news channels found four times more men than women, writes Reshma Patil on IndiaSpend.
  3. The Delhi High Court last week vacated an injunction by a civil court on a piece in the Caravan that explained how Arindam Chaudhuri made a fortune off the aspirations and insecurities of India’s middle class. Read the entire piece here.
  4. In the last 10 months, the Uttar Pradesh police has conducted four “encounters” a day. Neha Dixit, who met the families of 14 people killed in these incidents, writes in the Wire.
  5. “As the mood turns, and public support for PM Modi and his government starts cooling, the propaganda machine faces a real test. Increasingly, the attempts by these channels to twist reality into shapes that only contortionists can achieve are looking pathetic,” writes Santosh Desai in the Times of India.
  6. Zach Baron in GQ tells the sad story of the stupendous rise and surprising disappearance of the once ubiquitous movie star, Brendan Fraser.
  7. Vatsala Chhibber in Mint asks what motivates young, successful millennials to give up worldly possessions and become Jain monks?
  8. Is the development of the gun, and the suppression of similar arms technology in its colonies, the basis of modern English civilisation, asks Priya Satia in Aeon.
  9. “Concrete is a useful experiment in this kind of approach. It warrants attention because it is there –shaping and shaped by the aspirations, failures, and attempts at control that undergird modernity in the region; an assemblage of the past and present manifest and materialised in forms as diverse as faux Italian villas to misshapen flyovers.” Duncan McDuie-Ra writes about concrete in India’s Northeast on Raoit.in.
  10. “It started with a drive to put up security cameras in the aftermath of the 2009 riots before evolving into something far more sophisticated, as Xinjiang turned into a place for state-connected companies to test all of their surveillance innovations,” writes Nithin Coca on Engadget.

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