People make a space, but a space — the lack or excess of it, the perception or the memory of it — makes people, too The apartment was on the 22nd floor of a building that came with a carpeted foyer, an elevator with a liftman who saluted the puffy-haired ladies who rode them, and […]
If you were the youngest in a pack of cousins, summer holidays were the best of times and the worst of times. Till you discovered a library of old books. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince first came to me on the summer after I turned eight. We were, of course, at our grandparents’ sprawling […]
In the homogenous world of Mizo television, everyone from Prerna in Ekta Kapoor’s Kasautii Zindagii Kay to Elsa in Disney’s Frozen speaks fluent Mizo. But behind this vernacular crossover is a network of people: translators, dubbing artistes and editors. This is how they do it In 2003, when Sente was a schoolgirl in Aizawl, her […]
The 72-year-old, ostracised and branded a witch, devoted her life, and, through her organisation Mission Birubala, has been behind the state’s law to check the practice Sometime in 2010, Birubala Rabha thought she was going to die. Afloat the Brahmaputra, with a film crew who was interviewing her, the wooden boat suddenly capsized, throwing overboard […]
From November 2017 to August 2018, the tigress has killed 39 animals. But for reasons best known to the villagers of Borobazar, she still roams, unscathed and free. When the tigress made her first kill — a cow, bound near the yard of one Forhan Daimari — the villagers of Borobazar in Kalaigaon in Assam’s […]
In a particularly devastating flood in Assam this year, 49 children have died, accounting for 44.5 per cent of the total deaths reported On June 1, a 13-year-old in Assam’s Nagaon district drowned while chasing ducks in a flooded river near his house. A month later, on July 1, a six-year-old slipped and fell into the slushy waters of […]
Considered the most beautiful duck in the world, the Mandarin duck made an appearance in Assam’s Tinsukia last week after more than a century. Floating in the Maguri-Motapung beel (or wetland) in Assam’s Tinsukia district for over a week is the spectacular and rare Mandarin duck. First spotted on February 8 by Madhab Gogoi, a […]
Temperatures have been high, at least 5 to 6 degrees above normal for this time of the year On a sunny Saturday afternoon, in the heart of Shillong’s iconic Police Bazaar, customers rummaged through mounds of clothes piled next to Biolin Pyrtuh. For 15 years now, Pyrtuh has conducted her business in this fashion: out […]
This article was originally published in Reuters in April 2025. Below is a longer version. Byrnihat, a small industrial town on the Assam-Meghalaya border, has been ranked the “world’s most polluted metropolitan area” in the World Air Quality Report 2024 released by Swiss group IQAir Sumaiya Ansari is barely three years old but she has […]
50 years after they were set up, Sainik Schools have opened doors to girls. We meet the six 12-year-olds making history in a Mizoram village, dreaming to be soldiers, sailors and pilots, and barely sweating about it. The boys, they are catching up. 6:154 is a number Zonunpuii Lalnunpuia barely understands. Ten per cent is […]