In the mornings in Varanasi, the air on the banks of the Ganges fills with the scent of burning bodies. On the steps of the Manikarnika ghat—the holiest of the city’s stepped riverbanks, upon which Hindu dead are cremated—the fires are already lit, and mourners assemble by the hundred to …
Read More »The Hundred-Year Battle for India’s Radio Airwaves
Radio has been part of Zareef Ahmad Zareef’s life since childhood. Today, he listens every morning and says it’s “a mandatory indulgence” in the evenings. A Kashmiri poet, Zareef has worked on radio as a cultural and literary commentator—he’s even written programs for children—and he says that the medium is …
Read More »YouTube and Reels Could Decide India’s Elections
Sharvan Patel’s Instagram account is a window into daily life in the vast deserts of western India: children fighting calves for camel milk, a grandmother drying pickles on top of a mud house, or a farmer eating under the only tree in a barren land. Patel’s passion for wildlife conservation …
Read More »Hard Drives, YouTube, and Murder: India’s Dark History of Digital Hate
A crowd had gathered at a village temple in Kesapuri, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, when Vikas Patil plugged a hard drive into his laptop to begin his show. First, he showed them an explicit video of a cow being killed. The animals are considered sacred to “upper …
Read More »India Plans to Change the Weather to Fight Back Against Deadly Smog
India’s capital, New Delhi, is preparing a new weapon in the fight against deadly air pollution: cloud seeding. The experiment, which could take place as early as next week, would introduce chemicals like silver iodide into a cloudy sky to create rain and, it’s hoped, wash away the fine particulate …
Read More »Glacial Lakes Threaten Millions in a Warming World
“We saw houses vanish in front of our eyes,” says Aadesh, an engineer living in the northern Indian state of Sikkim. One of them was his own. In the early hours of October 4, Lhonak Lake—a Himalayan glacial lake—burst its banks, releasing huge amounts of water into the river valleys …
Read More »India Is Using Terrorism Laws to Target Journalists
A special unit of the Delhi Police, reporting directly to Narendra Modi’s union government, this morning seized the laptops and phones of journalists and satirists associated with a news website, Newsclick.in. The site has been charged under a law usually used to deal with terrorism suspects, and two journalists have …
Read More »Inside the Race to Stop a Deadly Viral Outbreak in India
On the morning of September 11, critical care specialist Anoop Kumar was presented with an unusual situation. Four members of the same family had been admitted to his hospital—Aster MIMS in Kozhikode, Kerala—the previous day, all similarly sick. Would he take a look? He gathered his team of doctors to …
Read More »India’s Elite Tech Schools Are a Golden Ticket With a Dark Side
A place at an Indian Institute of Technology is a golden ticket. There are 23 IITs across India, the country’s most elite technology training institutions: a production line for CEOs. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Flipkart’s founder Sachin Bansal are among their alumni. So are Infosys founder N. R. Narayana …
Read More »India’s Lander Touches Down on the Moon. Russia’s Has Crashed
Today, India’s Chandrayaan-3 became the first spacecraft to successfully land near the lunar south pole, and India became the fourth country to make a soft landing anywhere on lunar soil, following the former Soviet Union, the United States, and China. The robotic vehicle touched down at 8:33 am Eastern time, …
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