In the economy of literature festivals, literary merit is often optional. You just have to put up a good show. Read @contendish’s piece: theswaddle.com/to-attend-a-l…

The Special Intensive Revision, pitched as a voter verification drive to purge “illegal immigrants,” gives the state room to redefine voter eligibility. Anyone it sees as unwanted are being pushed off the rolls. Read the piece by @contendish: theswaddle.com/the-sir-s-arc…

Excavating celebrity journalism's brief reign as Bollywood’s most ungovernable institution. Read here: theswaddle.com/in-the-republ…

Are you a girl's girl or are you the boyfriend's girl best friend? Welcome to the monoculture of algorithmically mass-produced femininity. Read the piece here: theswaddle.com/against-girl-…

Published in the long shadow of 9/11, Mahmood Mamdani’s “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim” remains one of the sharpest accounts of how the Cold War and its aftermath altered the lives of Muslims across the globe. In it, Mamdani traces how American covert wars fostered militant networks, how the language of “culture” replaced the language of politics, and how entire populations were split into caricatures of loyalty and threat. Expelled by Idi Amin in 1972, rendered stateless in 1984, Mamdani built a body of writing that treated colonialism not as a past event but as ongoing structure. Instead of treating violence as the product of some “civilisation,” “culture,” or inherent way of being, he asks us to see it as the result of political decisions, policies, histories, and power struggles. As India’s Muslims are pushed into tests of patriotism, erased from public life, and cast as either compliant or suspect, Mamdani’s work offers a vocabulary for seeing continuity where governments insist on tidy turning points.

How the world turned Malala Yousafzai into a brand of hope while letting real change slip by. Read the piece by @contendish: theswaddle.com/malala-and-th…

Zohran Mamdani's mayoral campaign in New York City revives the idea of a city built for people over corporations. Read the piece here: theswaddle.com/zohran-mamdan…

For some readers and critics, Arundhati Roy is either political or literary — rarely both. Read @contendish’s piece: theswaddle.com/we-re-reading…

Present Tense: A stream of consciousness response to the mess in the news. theswaddle.com/met-dandys-an…

This week on Respectfully Disagree, we dive into nihilism as the mood of the moment and how shared dread has reshaped our culture. Listen here: theswaddle.com/is-nihilism-t…

"Bollywood’s myth-making about Kashmir remains limited to either an exoticised pastoral escape or a symbol to articulate the idea of Indian nationhood. The representation invisiblizes the true political, social, and ideological state of Kashmiri natives." Kashmiri filmmaker @hyderhabib writes about why the story of Kashmir can never be told authentically as long as the storytellers are from the mainland. Read the full piece here: theswaddle.com/why-bollywood… Design: @Sonar_hitesh_

In this week’s episode of Respectfully Disagree, we discuss how woke culture has evolved and dissect the real question: is woke culture over? Listen here: open.spotify.com/episode/5uR…

Wrote about Mumbai, and how @PayalKapadia86’s All We Imagine As Light changed the lensing for it. So glad I could make this happen with @shripad__ @kimkatsgotthat and other friends who contributed. Thanks Aish and @TheSwaddle 🩵 theswaddle.com/all-we-imagin…