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✍️ Written by Saket Suman There is no neat way to say this: the Great Indian Dream is dying. And it’s not being killed in faraway conflict zones, or in newsrooms that peddle noise instead of truth. It is being murdered in back offices of publishing houses and literary circuits, where contracts are torn with a smile, where deadlines are missed with impunity, where one writer's labour of years is discarded over silence, and where reputations are butchered so that the powerful remain unbothered. The very spaces meant to champion creativity are the first to abandon those who try to speak freely, those who refuse to bend, those who dare to write with sincerity. Representational Image: The 1st stamp of independent India shows the Indian Flag, released on 21Nov1947. I have lived through this. I have worked on a book that came from lived experience, research, pain, and a rare kind of stubborn hope. And I have watched that book — like countless others before it — be derailed by a system tha...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman Taliban foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi on Sunday addressed a press conference in New Delhi where both male and female journalists were present. This is a marked departure from the earlier controversy that erupted over the exclusion of women reporters from a similar event. Speaking at the presser, Muttaqi addressed the backlash over the earlier incident, saying the exclusion of women was not deliberate but rather a result of logistical constraints.  Women journalists at Taliban Presser. Image Via: Dr Pooja Tripathi “Regarding the press conference, it was due to the short notice. The participation list was prepared with specific journalists, and it was neither a technical issue nor any deliberate exclusion. It was not intended,” he said. The clarification came after significant condemnation from opposition leaders, press freedom bodies, and civil society.  The Editors Guild of India and the Indian Women Press Corps (IWPC) had issued strong statem...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman Mahatma Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth is not the story of a perfect man as political heavyweights present themselves to be -- and that is perhaps precisely why it endures still today. It is a book filled with self-doubt, failures, confessions, and contradictions. But it remains one of the most powerful examples of a life devoted to truth, however painful, however incomplete that pursuit may be. Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a few days before he was assassinated. There’s something profoundly disarming about the way Gandhi presents himself. He does not hide behind legacy, myth, or moral superiority. He does not edit out the parts of himself that might be mocked or misunderstood. Instead, he offers his life as a series of experiments -- some noble, some naive, but all of them are deeply personal. The tone is intimate, often vulnerable.  You feel, as a reader, that you are being let in. Attended a prayer meeting at Gandhi Sm...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman At the Colorado edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) in the United States, a well-dressed panel sat beneath stage lights, bathed in the glow of literary performance. The session’s title, projected grandly behind them, read:  “Water, Water Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink.” Wrong . JLF: PhD in Fakery. Via Sanjoy Roy on X That’s not what Coleridge wrote. The original line, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , is:  “Water, water, everywhere,  Nor any drop to drink.” It’s nor , not not . This is a classic metaphor for what JLF has become: a festival of posturing without precision, of quotation without comprehension. It’s a stage where the most revered lines in English literature are mangled in broad daylight -- and no one even notices. Or worse, no one cares . Because for the gatekeepers of this literary cartel, literature is merely a prop . A backdrop against which their curated elites, their sons, their friends, and their...

Sisters will tie silken threads around their brothers’ wrists in homes across India today. This is a simple ritual that has outlasted empires, migrations, and the clockwork march of modernity. In the hinterlands, in crowded chawls of Mumbai, and in the wide suburban kitchens of the Indian diaspora, the same scenes will play out: a rakhi, some no more than a humble braid of cotton, others glittering with beads will be tied with hands that once pulled a sibling’s hair, wiped his tears, or shared a stolen sweet. Representational Image Source: Ajaz Ganderbali on X Raksha Bandhan, celebrated on the full moon of the Hindu month of Shravana, Purnima, carries the literal meaning “the bond of protection.” But the tie it commemorates is less a promise of chivalry and more a compact of mutual care. It is an old idea, so old that its historical record blurs into legend. In the great Indian epic of Mahabharata, Draupadi ties a strip of cloth around Krishna’s bleeding finger; in return, he vows to p...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman There was a time when Smriti Irani was the ruling Indian political party, the BJP’s showstopper, a former soap queen turned political slayer who handed Rahul Gandhi a shock defeat in Amethi back in 2019. She was an icon of ambition, grit, and transformation, or so they told her story. But as India’s electoral tide turned last summer, Irani found herself on the wrong end of a quiet political battle. This battle was not led by dynastic clout or prime-time optics but by a man they mocked as a “peon” and that was a fitting departure for her from Amethi. Image Source: Dr. Nimo Yadav on X Kishori Lal Sharma didn’t have glamorous titles or PR agencies. He had four decades of ground work, loyalty to the Gandhi family, and, as it turned out, the pulse of Amethi remained in his favour till the very last vote was polled.  When he promised he would defeat Irani, people laughed. But on result day, it was a complete political obliteration, the annihilation of Irani's sh...