Bearing Witness to the Age is the first substantial collection from Behçet Necatigil, one of the most distinctive and influential figures of 20th-century Turkish poetry. Translated by Neil P Doherty and Gökçenur Ç, the collection – published, interestingly, in India – introduces English-speaking readers to a poet whose work articulates a grounded vision of Turkish modernism – shaped less by manifestos and more by the fragile dignity of ordinary life.

Unlike Anglo-American modernism, Turkish modernism did not emerge under a unified name or program. It existed as a constellation of overlapping poetic currents such as Edebiyat-ı Cedide (The New Literature), Milli Edebiyat (National Literature), the Garip movement, Sosyalist Gerçekçilik (Socialist Realism), and İkinci Yeni (Second New). Only retrospectively, from the 1980s onward, did critics describe this period as “modernism.” Among these currents, the Second New proved especially influential for its imagistic density and formal experimentation....

Indian families are increasingly spending on private coaching out of school to improve children’s learning outcomes. Nearly two in five students in secondary school are enrolled in some coaching classes, up from under a quarter in primary school, according to the Comprehensive Modular Survey on Education 2025, conducted across 52,085 households between April and June 2025.

In addition, about 38% of students are enrolled in private schools, where overall household expenditure per student, on average, is 10 times that in government schools. Taken together, families with school-going children spend between 5% and 10% of their monthly expenditure on education and related costs, our analysis shows. Spending patterns vary across social groups.

“When we say that parents are not paying any fee under the Right to Education [RTE Act], we need to understand that there is a lot of ‘opportunity cost’ of education that parents pay,” said Kishore Darak, a senior educationist working in the sector for close to three decades. “For example, a child going to school may require her mother to stay at home as a caregiver to younger siblings. In that case, she loses her daily wages, adding to the opportunity cost the parents must bear.”...

Rarely does the word brilliant fall short for an exceptional artist. For Raghu Rai, it does. His eyes were a camera and the camera held his gaze and blinked exactly to his command. Browsing through his photographs, viewers are more than stunned by his timing, his eye, and his presence in places were life was aching to be discovered and caught in the stillness of motion.

A protégé of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Raghu Rai worked as a photographer-journalist in The Statesman and India Today. His images appeared in scores of other publications around the world. He covered the Bangladesh war of 1971 and the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984, among other events.

Rai’s most memorable projects keep probing the question of calamity – natural, historical and political. He was a keen observer of the destitution of human life faced by displacement and the disappearance of destination. The camera frames and reframes the question of survival, where you are left with something more than agony and empathy.

Rai’s images of the Bhopal tragedy are surreal: they focus on empty eyes and gazes that do not look at us and prevent us from looking at them. They are caught in their own time that separates us from them....

“There is no word for ‘design’ in our Indian languages,” says design historian Suchitra Balasubramanyan. The discourse, she points out, has been built almost entirely in English, shaped by upper-caste, upper-class practitioners and Western standards.

For approximately five centuries, design in the subcontinent has served colonial, and continues to serve post-colonial, capitalist systems. In the process, design has played a role in erasing, distorting, or disrupting earlier forms of indigenous visual language and culture.

So, when India’s readers look at what lines their bookshelves, whose visual language does it represent? No design is ever neutral and the covers of Indian books in English are no exception.

A culture of borrowed templates

In a podcast on decolonising design, Dr Dori Tunstall reflects: “We often define [design] as something that happened in Europe in the 1800s.” This hierarchy is entrenched. European traditions are treated as the measure against which all else is compared, while everything outside that frame is folded into the category of “craft.”...

“​​One day my children can ask me how a revolution happens, and I’ll serve them up the answer on a silver platter engraved with a gun and a sickle. What actually, really happens after a revolution is something I’ve never heard anyone ask out loud.”

Shida Bazyar’s novel, The Nights are Quiet in Tehran, translated from the German by Ruth Martin and shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize, assumes greater clarity and urgency given the ongoing Iran–America/Israel war. A general dislike for America and a distrust of Israel have long existed among Iranians, and it is perhaps this, coupled with Iran’s strongman politics, that has resulted in the unexpected upper hand over the America-Israel axis.

1979–2009

Bazyar’s novel follows two generations of a family from 1979 to 2009, through protests against the monarchy and the Shah and Obama’s presidential inauguration. Bookended by these two historical events, a family sifts through exile, migration, and homecoming while organising and hoping for a new dawn....

“They were different from everyone else.”

That’s how Peter Barrall remembers the Anglo-Indian princesses Sophia and Bamba when they visited Walnut Tree Cottage in Blo’ Norton, a tiny village in the sandy heathlands of Norfolk.

It was 1939. After the outbreak of World War II, Barrall – then six – had been evacuated from his school in London to the estate owned by the daughters of Duleep Singh, the last ruler of the Sikh empire and last Indian owner of the Koh-i-Noor diamond.

Barrall, now 92, remembers spotting Sophia and Bamba on their occasional visits to the property. Sophia, often wearing a sari, was friendly. Bamba was more imperious.

He never saw their elusive middle sister, Catherine, who spent much of her adult life in Germany and therefore may have had less affection for East Anglia, where all three princesses grew up.

Barrall had been coached by the housekeeper never to approach the women first. But if one of them spoke to him, he was to say, “Good morning, your highness.”

A short video of Barrall’s recollections shatters the proverbial glass case behind which history is typically displayed. It is among the many charms of a new exhibition, “The Last Princesses of the Punjab”, in London’s Kensington Palace, where Queen Victoria was born....

There are two ways to read A Kind of Meat and Other Stories by Catherine Thankamma. One is through the lens of a traditional, conservative reality that continues to shape much of Indian society. The other is as a collection of everyday stories about ordinary lives that often go unnoticed. These are stories of the small tremors that govern our lives, similar to the ones millennials like me grew up witnessing, often unaware of the hurt that people rarely talked about.

There are no grand environmental crusades, global wars, or dystopian visions in these stories. They feel as real and routine as our daily habits. But at times, the quotidian becomes unsettling. In the title story, a young girl stirs up trouble without meaning to, simply by telling her landlord’s wife she ate beef to sound cool. Or how another young girl is mocked and dismissed when she tells her mother and aunt that a relative’s son grabbed her breast while she was at their house looking for the bathroom. Through such scenes, Thankamma points to a pattern where women, whether young or old, educated or uneducated, are brushed aside when they try to speak of what they have experienced, especially when it disturbs the comfort of others, even other women....

Before sunrise reached the lower slopes of the Gonasika Hills in Odisha’s Keonjhar district, Parmedhenu Juang was already in his field. It was early monsoon in June as the 54-year-old farmer bent over a patch of soil and let ragi fall through his fingers, examining the colour, weight and shape of the grain.

“Desi bihana are like living beings,” said Juang, referring to “traditional seeds” in Odia. “If they are cared for, they stay strong. If they are neglected, they slowly lose themselves.”

In Iruda village, at least three generations of Juang’s family, who are one of Odisha’s Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, have preserved traditional seeds such as finger millets, sorghum, little millet, pearl millet, black gram, cowpeas, green gram and paddy.

Once cultivated for food by the Adivasis in the region, many of these seeds are now disappearing.

The Green Revolution transformed India’s agricultural system, focusing on high-yielding hybrid seeds and chemical-intensive monocropping, such as wheat and rice. Diverse seeds, especially of crops grown outside government procurement, were sidelined....

I met Anurag Banerjee just after his friend’s poetry reading at the Shillong Literature Festival. He has a kind of easy, affable presence that draws interruptions: he left one friend to walk with me, was stopped mid-sentence by another during our conversation, and ran into someone else as soon as we finished. In a few hours, he would be onstage, this time being interviewed by another friemd – novelist Janice Pariat – for a panel.

He describes himself as a dkhar, a Khasi term for non-tribals, a label that marks him as an outsider in a city where belonging is tied to lineage and community. Banerjee is a photographer and writer whose two-volume project, The Songs of Our People, emerged from the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens in 2020 and his own reckoning with his homeland.

The first volume, published in 2024, focuses on younger musicians and politically charged genres such as rap and R&B, built from 19 extended interviews and collaborative portraits. The second, out late last year, turns to teachers, choirs, and the artists who shaped Shillong’s music scene, while also letting Banerjee write himself into the narrative, making the act of listening as much a part of the story as the music itself....