Weekend reads

  1. Pranab Mukherjee’s visit to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh event in Nagpur was an oppurtunity lost. Having risked his reputation, the former president did not make much of the chance except that, for the record, he said all the politically correct things, argues Suhas Palshikar in Indian Express. 
  2. In the Eastern province of Sri Lanka, Hindu Tamils oppose Muslim teachers wearing the abaya, an Arab gown, to school. This opposition is symptomatic of the widening fault lines in the island nation’s ethnically most diverse region, reports Meera Srinivasan in The Hindu. 
  3. Though more expensive than their unbranded counterparts, they do not compromise on quality, and are now easily available, says Ashok Kumar Vaid in Business Line on the need for pushing branded generic drugs. 
  4. Amanda Mull in Racked says that Dove’s Real Beauty campaign that sought to lift up women really just limited their acceptable emotions. 
  5. Is wrestling a metaphor for current global politics? Andrew Kay in The Point writes on how rivalries in this sport mirror the rivalries and power equations in global politics. 
  6.   As the first woman in Chinese literature to come out as openly gay, Qiu Miaojin adopted and humanised the bestial expectations of a cruel public, writes Ankita Chakraborty in Longreads. 
  7.   On Chicago’s Southside, Clarissa Glenn worked for ten years to get her husband out of prison after the police planted evidence on him. Her efforts ended up overturning thirty-two other convictions.  
  8. What does it mean to be a saturation diver? Jen Banbury reports on a profession that is weird, dangerous and isolated. 
  9. Half the way with Mao Zedong: How Students for a Democratic Society went from building a mass movement to embracing the politics of self-destruction. 
  10. The People of Ram: Joydip Mitra’s photo essay captures a community in Chattisgarh that claims the deity for its spiritual and social uplift.