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✍️ Written by Saket Suman The Indian Express investigation into the Election Commission is a reminder of what print journalism can still do in India, and of the unglamorous machinery that makes it possible Image Source: @IndianExpress on X Look at the dateline first, before you read a word of the story. Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi, Panaji. Four cities under a single byline. Nobody puts four cities on a story unless somebody has been to them, or has spent long enough on the phone with people in them to have earned the right. It is the least dramatic line in the whole piece and it tells you almost everything about how it came to exist. The story itself has been argued about all week. Ritika Chopra's investigation in The Indian Express , published on 23 September, reported that two of the three Election Commissioners had formally objected on record at least 14 times in ten months, four of them on a single day, to decisions taken and orders issue...

The men who surround a girl on an empty road believe they are enforcing something that is right and noble. Until that belief is dismantled, the arrests and encounters will keep coming and nothing substantial will change in the state that was once the cradle of civilization. There is an old Sanskrit word for it: kupamanduka , the frog in the well . He has never seen the sea. He does not even know that it exists. The circle of sky above him is, as far as he is concerned, the whole of the sky, and the walls around him are the limits of the world. He is not stupid. He is not even unhappy. He simply has no way of knowing what he is missing, and no reason to suspect there is anything to miss. Representational Image: @HistoryDefined on X Large parts of Bihar are living in that well. Not the whole state, and not all of its people, but enough of them, in enough villages and towns, that the consequences arrive on our screens every few weeks in the form of a recording made by someone who thought...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman The first thing the world's leaders saw when they arrived at Bharat Mandapam on September 12 was not a flag, not a map, not a welcome banner with diplomatic language about cooperation and shared futures. It was a 27-foot golden dancing Shiva — the Nataraja, the Lord of the Cosmic Dance — standing at the entrance in the early Delhi morning, arms extended in four directions, one leg raised, one foot trampling the demon of ignorance , a ring of fire encircling the whole thing, made from an alloy of eight metals including traces of silver and gold, weighing approximately 18 to 20 tonnes, cast without a single welded joint using a technique that goes back to Mohenjo-Daro. Image Source: @AmitShah on X This was what caught everybody's eyes before a word of diplomatic language was exchanged, before the declarations and the bilaterals and the joint statements and the photograph in which leaders stood before this very dance...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sat down with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the bilateral meeting ahead of the BRICS Summit and handed him a gift. It was a very thoughtful Russian-language translation of the Thirukkural, the 1,330 couplet Tamil classical text attributed to one of our greatest philosophers Thiruvalluvar, composed somewhere between the 4th century BCE and the 6th century CE, translated into more than 107 languages, claimed by Jains, Hindus, and Christians alike. Image Source: MEA India Putin accepted it.  The following evening, at the official gala dinner hosted by Modi at Bharat Mandapam, Putin and all other visiting dignitaries were served Khumb Galouti — tender pan-grilled mushroom kebabs with mint pearls on sheermal bread. Paneer Lababdar. Gucchi Marmik, Himalayan morel mushrooms with saffron and mamra almonds. Beetroot Raita. Shahtoot Phirni — slow-cooked pudding topped with sweet mulberr...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman A glacier collapsed on Langtang Lirung on the Nepal-China border and fell five kilometres into the valley below o n the morning of August 26, 2026 . The Bhotekoshi river reached the gauge at Syabrubesi in thirteen minutes. The warning texts went out to residents of Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading and Chitwan thirty-eight minutes after the collapse. At least 1,369 people died in Nepal. Forty-three died in Tibet. The bodies of some victims were carried as many as 240 kilometres into India. We now know that there was no transboundary monitoring arrangement between China and Nepal, or between China and India, covering the slope that failed. There never was. Seventeen days later, the leaders of India and China will meet in New Delhi. File Photo: @China_Amb_India I want to begin there because everything else will make more sense if we start with the glacier. The Third Pole, as scientists call the Hindu Kush-Himalayan system, is w...

The Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi will host the 18th BRICS Leaders' Summit on September 12 and 13. This will be the culmination of India's fourth chairship of a grouping that has, in twenty years, gone from an economist's acronym to an eleven-nation bloc representing nearly half the world's population. Vladimir Putin is confirmed. Xi Jinping is expected, though Beijing has not formally said so — his preparations are underway and if he arrives it will be his first visit to India since the informal summit with Modi at Mamallapuram in October 2019. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and several other leaders from member and partner nations are on the list. Central government offices in Delhi are closed tomorrow for logistics. The capital has been building toward this for months. File Photo/Representational; Via: @AmitShah on X The G20 presidency in 2023...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman Thousands of young Indians marched from Jantar Mantar toward Parliament in monsoon rain and were met with tear gas, lathi charges, internet shutdowns, and mass detentions. Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the Cockroach Janta Party, was detained. Sonam Wangchuk, on the twenty-second day of a hunger strike that had already cost him at least 8.5 kilograms, wrote a handwritten note from his hospital bed requesting temporary release to join the march. The request was not granted. Image Via: @Cockroachisback on X The Education Minister did not resign. The Monsoon Session opened on schedule. The government held.  And yet something has happened today in Delhi that cannot be managed away with a press briefing. How We Got Here What began on May 15 as a Supreme Court judge's offhand comparison of unemployed youth to "cockroaches" became, within six weeks, one of the most significant youth mobilisations in India since the...