Anuja Chauhan

Contributing Editor at The Week (India)

Books over IRL anyday

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Articles

We spend our lives denying death

1 week ago | theweek.in | Anuja Chauhan

A friend just posted an Instagram story—an aerial shot of Mumbai—with the caption: “Landed! Surely ‘landed’ is the most beautiful word in the world?#Thankful.”We’re all struggling to make sense of the horrific tragedy that was Air India flight 171. The scale of it, the suddenness, the sheer randomness—both for those on board and the ones simply eating a meal on the ground.
Jaipur: When pink turned sour

3 weeks ago | theweek.in | Anuja Chauhan

Sometimes, living in Bengaluru makes me pathetically homesick for the north, so I readily agreed to lead a writer’s workshop in Jaipur. Rajasthan is home turf for me—I have cousins in almost every city, and the Rajput spice box (hing, garlic, saunf, red chillies, mustard oil) is the taste of my childhood and my nani’s cooking.
Women should not be Non-Playable Characters

1 month ago | theweek.in | Anuja Chauhan

My children started using the term ‘NPC’ a few years ago. It originates from video games, and stands for ‘non-playable-character’, which means that when the game offers you a choice of characters whose identity you can assume in order to play the game, NPCs are not on the list. This is because NPCs are typically side-characters, somebody with a few stock lines and actions. They are there to keep the plot moving, but definitely not key or consequential in any way.
Operation Sindoor is effective branding

1 month ago | theweek.in | Anuja Chauhan

Operation Sindoor is effective branding. It pays homage to the lives and the grieving wives of the 26 blameless civilian men we lost, thus reminding the world, every time the operation is mentioned, that our action was purely retributive, and it also puns neatly on Sindhu, our shared river and our shared heritage, and the treaty we have currently put in abeyance.
What is a ‘working funeral’? The Papal one, for example

2 months ago | theweek.in | Anuja Chauhan

Donald Trump tweeted, “Melania and I will be going to the funeral of Pope Francis, in Rome. We look forward to being there!” This didn’t go down well with the nit-picky folks on X, because who “looks forward” to going to a funeral? It isn’t exactly a wedding, or a music festival or some sort of Roman holiday. Surely something in the general zone of ‘we will be attending to pay our last respects’ would have been more suitable?
The great American betrayal: Does the US still stand for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

2 months ago | theweek.in | Anuja Chauhan

I have become horridly fascinated by the Donald Trump circus. It should be ticketed entertainment, except it can’t be, because it isn’t entertainment really—too many lives and livelihoods on the line. But I am staying up late and checking the morning headlines in the US compulsively, the way I used to stay up to watch StarPlus drop the latest episodes of Anupamaa, back in the good old days when Anupamaa used to be good.
Kunal Kamra is feared not for his jokes, but for his truth bombs

Mar 29, 2025 | theweek.in | Anuja Chauhan

Let’s be very clear. The outrage over Kunal Kamra’s ‘Naya Bharat’ act (barely a day old and already past four million views) isn’t because he might have called Eknath Shinde a traitor.
Forget MAGA and MIGA, go for MDGA-Making Diplomacy Great Again

Mar 15, 2025 | theweek.in | Anuja Chauhan

Must say that all the reports of ‘Agent Krasnov’ make fascinating reading—like one of those old school, thick-as-a-brick bestsellers that Irving Wallace and Robert Ludlum used to write.
Men, too, have glass ceilings

Mar 1, 2025 | theweek.in | Anuja Chauhan

The more I read about rape, suicide, family troubles, unemployment, toxic masculinity, excessive religiosity and hysterical jingoism, the more I feel we have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. We have been funding NGOs, holding summits, creating policy and demonstrating and what-not―all focusing on improving the status of women. But maybe what we really need to do is to focus on our men.
Stop applauding the sporadic victories of ‘kings’

Feb 15, 2025 | theweek.in | Anuja Chauhan

We invented chess, which was pretty cool of us. The original game ‘chaturanga’—that is four divisions (infantry, cavalry, elephantry and chariotry)—was a war strategy game. When the game travelled to the Middle East, they mangled the Sanskrit and it ended up being called ‘shatranj’ instead.