Feature Story
The Fish With a Foreign Policy!
No fish has diplomatic relations. Hilsa does.It belongs, taxonomically, to the herring family — Clupeidae, not the more exotic-sounding name it sometimes gets mistaken for — and was once …
A Poem Called Ilish!
My father told me about this poem the way he told me most things that mattered — sideways, at a fish market, while haggling over the weight of a hilsa. I don't remember the price he settled on.…
The Woman and the Sword!
A sword is not a garland. No one hands it to you. You have to want it.This is what makes fencing, of all things, an unlikely site of feminist meaning in India — a country where the sword has al…
What the Mountain Keeps!
There is a boot on the trail near the summit of Everest, bright green, still bright after twenty years.Every climber who passes it knows exactly whose it marks. Green Boots" is the remains of Indian …
The Great Emu War: When the Birds Refused to Surrender!
History has no shortage of improbable episodes. Few, however, rival the spectacle of a modern army taking on a flock of flightless birds—and losing the argument. In 1932, after a punishing d…
The Faithful and the Forgotten: Loyalty in The Odyssey!
Odysseus takes ten years to come home. His wife takes ten years to wait. But the epic's real architecture is not built on these two alone — it survives on a whole scaffolding of lesser loyaltie…