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3 weeks ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Amitav GhoshAmitav Ghosh |Neha Sinha |Meena Kandasamy |Vaishna Roy
Amitav Ghosh’s Wild Fictions starts with a deceptively novel-like tone. We meet Bangladeshi migrants in Italy; Ghosh is interviewing them there. The chapter ebbs and flows in characteristic Ghosh style: he writes about people whose personal stories, grief, and disappointments wash over you. He describes Palash, a Bangladeshi migrant who is beaten up by a Kalashnikov-carrying Libyan gang (Libya being a stopover for entry into Italy).
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3 weeks ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Meena Kandasamy |Vaishna Roy
The killing of Jagabar Ali in January this year by members of Tamil Nadu’s mining mafia may have added another dark chapter to the ongoing battle against illegal mining in the State, but activists are equally worried over the fact that neither the government nor the judiciary has been able to stem the rot. The judiciary, for its part, has largely confined itself to issuing directions without ensuring their implementation.
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3 weeks ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Ilangovan Rajasekaran |Meena Kandasamy |Vaishna Roy
After the murder of the activist Jagabar Ali on January 17, the Tamil Nadu government ordered the Department of Geology and Mining to do a survey on mining activities across the State and submit a detailed report. The department began the task in Pudukottai district. However, after drone surveys were done in just 200 quarries of Thirumayam block, the work was stopped on the grounds that the Ali murder case had been transferred to the CB-CID.
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3 weeks ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Ilangovan Rajasekaran |Meena Kandasamy |Vaishna Roy
Tamil Nadu has seen a spate of cold-blooded murders of activists who oppose mining across categories—whether the mining of stone, granite, river sand, or beach sand. Powerful gangs operate these businesses, concentrated in Madurai, Pudukottai, Tirunelveli, Erode, and Krishnagiri districts, and they deal with all opponents ruthlessly, whether they are residents, activists, whistle-blowers, or officials.
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3 weeks ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Ilangovan Rajasekaran |Meena Kandasamy |Vaishna Roy
Kareem Jagabar Ali knew his life was in danger from the day he blew the whistle on the rampant illicit rough-stone quarrying that was taking place across Tamil Nadu’s Pudukottai district. He knew he was waging a lone battle against a menacing and powerful quarry-mining mafia. Since he had once been a part of the quarrying business, he had a deep understanding of it. He also knew he needed more than an indomitable will to expose the industry’s murky underbelly.
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3 weeks ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Vaishna Roy |Meena Kandasamy
When we were looking at photographs to pick for the cover of this issue, I recalled those unforgettable and oft-quoted lines from A.K. Ramanujan’s translation of a love poem from the Kuruntogai:“But in love our hearts are as red earth and pouring rain:mingled beyond parting.”The reference is to the love between two people, but the poet could well have been speaking of another phenomenon—the love of the Tamil people for their land.
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3 weeks ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Meena Kandasamy |Vaishna Roy |Manohar Shetty
When her older brother Mario was killed in an accident at an oilwell in Oman, Serena received condolences from all the residents of St. Jerome’s. Most of them had never met Mario, and the few who had, recalled him as a quiet, withdrawn but hardworking young man. Serena, a secretary with a mining company, had never been close to her older brother, and in fact hadn’t met him for close to seven years, but she accepted the words of sympathy and commiseration with a suitable display of teary grief.
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3 weeks ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Gowhar Geelani |Meena Kandasamy |Vaishna Roy
In early 2015, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), against the wishes of its voters, shockingly stitched an alliance with the BJP to form a coalition government. After an “Agenda for Alliance” document was given the final approval by the two ideologically antithetical parties, key observers on Kashmir’s dicey political turf dubbed it an “unholy alliance” and “political suicide” for the PDP.
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3 weeks ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Meena Kandasamy |Vaishna Roy |Nirupama Subramanian
In the first episode of our new weekly show on Frontline called Latitude, we will focus on India’s foreign policy and all the interesting developments across the world that have impacted our lives. Today we’ll be talking about the shock that US President Donald Trump delivered with his announcement on April 6 of a second set of massive spikes in tariffs on almost all countries that trade with the US. He called it Liberation Day.
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3 weeks ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Ruchir Joshi |Meena Kandasamy |Vaishna Roy |Anjum Hasan
There is a great deal afoot in the Calcutta of the early 1940s, not least imminent invasion by the Japanese army, but Kedar Lahiri, a young novice painter from the uppermost Bengali crust, stays out of politics. He is taken up with the challenge of bringing his canvases to life. Tricky because the city’s human fecundity, its ever-shifting light, its brilliant foliage—“He’s tired of green…. Cascades of green that defeat the eye with their variety”—render the painter supremely irrelevant.
