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1 month ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Ajay Saini |Vaishna Roy
Two decades ago, when the Indian Ocean tsunami wiped out their remote village of Pulobhabi on Great Nicobar’s western coast, nine Nicobarese defied the odds and survived the deadly waves. Their lifeline? The forest—their oldest ally—sheltered, nourished, and sustained them. For nearly six weeks, they relied entirely on its bounty, navigating its depths until they emerged on the island’s eastern coast at Campbell Bay, where rescuers found them and brought them to relief camps.
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2 months ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Ajay Saini |Vaishna Roy
In 1967, a young student sat in the library of Christ’s College, Cambridge, drowning in despair. He had come to the prestigious university to study mathematics. However, the elite institution, the rigid discipline, and the entire atmosphere felt painfully disconnected from the real world—hollow, irrelevant. As he grappled with his disillusionment, his gaze fell upon a book lying on the desk: Suicide by Émile Durkheim. He picked it up.
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Ajay Saini |Seema Sharma |Karan Madhok |Vaishna Roy
December 2-3, 1984. Around 40 tonnes of highly toxic methyl isocyanate gas escaped from the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal—choking and blinding the city within hours, with its most vulnerable residents suffering the worst. The disaster, a result of glaring safety lapses, cost-cutting, and technical failures, has since claimed over 25,000 lives, and has left more than half a million people reeling from lifelong injuries, chronic illnesses, and trauma.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Siddhartha Deb |Shakir Mir |Ajay Saini |Mani Shankar Aiyar
There has been plenty of commentary on the evolution of Hindu nationalism in India over the past decade. Many of these works—with honourable exceptions, of course—tend to frame this story in a linear trajectory, the main themes of which are centred around the origin of the RSS, the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and Babri Masjid demolition, the Gujarat riots and Narendra Modi.
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Aug 20, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Ajay Saini |Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay |Jinoy Jose P |Saba Naqvi
Despite numerous progressive constitutional provisions, Adivasis continue to endure a lot of marginalisation. They account for 8.6 per cent of the nation’s population, as per the 2011 Census, but a staggering 40.6 per cent of them live below the poverty line. Historical injustices dating back to the British Raj, exacerbated by the post-Independence top-down development approach, have relegated them to the margins.
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Aug 18, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay |Ajay Saini |Jinoy Jose P |Saba Naqvi
Rani Mandal of Natun Shibpur village in Samserganj block, Murshidabad district, had gone to take a bath in the river, when she noticed it swirling menacingly. She had been living in the region long enough to know what that foretold, and she rushed back to her home by the waterfront, but it was already too late. A video shot by a neighbour showed her house being swallowed by the river—like a mythical monster devouring its prey.
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Mar 7, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | David Grann |Ajay Saini |Paranjoy Guha Thakurta |Talmiz Ahmad
In January 1742, a rickety boat drifted into the port of Rio Grande, Brazil. It brought 30 half-naked, emaciated, and nearly dead men back to the shores of “civilization”. Some eight months earlier, their ill-fated man-of-war—the H.M.S. Wager—had wrecked on a remote “uninhabited” island off the coast of western Patagonia. These remnants of the crew had battled an unforgiving sea and worse in a ragtag boat for over a hundred days—voyaging nearly 4,800 km—to reach the port.
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Feb 23, 2024 | 
outlookindia.com | Ajay Saini
In mid-November 2018, a Bible-clutching American evangelist trespassed onto the forbidden North Sentinel Island in the Andamans and laid eyes on the “world’s most isolated” indigenous people—the Sentinelese. “My name is John [Chau] ... Jesus Christ gave me the authority to come to you,” he hollered. The Sentinelese, who live in voluntary isolation, repelled him. The evangelist, however, was resolute to “declare Jesus” to the inhabitants of “Satan’s last stronghold.” And the rest is history.
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Feb 3, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Ajay Saini |Purushottam Agrawal |Vaishna Roy
November 15, 2018. A spectacular double rainbow arched over the North Sentinel Island, one of the islands in the Andamans archipelago in the Bay of Bengal. At the island’s southwest cove, a 26-year-old American evangelist, John Allen Chau, gingerly paddled his kayak over the dead coral reefs to spy on the islanders.
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May 18, 2023 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Nandita Jayaraj |Ajay Saini |T.K. Rajalakshmi |Ashutosh Sharma
For anyone interested in the history of life on the planet, India is a uniquely fascinating natural experiment. The tectonic plate that the country lies on was once stuck to Antarctica, close to the southern pole. About 100 million years ago, it began drifting northwards, and about 55 million years ago, it collided with Asia, which resulted in the gargantuan Himalayan mountain range.
