Samanth Subramanian

Dec 30, 2024 | washingtonpost.com | Samanth Subramanian |Emily Wright

Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience. Photos and videos by Jagoda Lasota for The Washington Post December 31, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EINDHOVEN, Netherlands - On an indoor soccer field here, a championship-winning team is running its drills. Each player stakes out a position, makes precise adjustments and fires the orange ball at another. On the sidelines, manager René van de Molengraft paces and observes.

Dec 23, 2024 | samanth.substack.com | Samanth Subramanian

With barely a week to go for the new year, a stocktaking is inevitable. I still have an article in at the Washington Post, that I believe will be published before 2024 is out. But that aside, I’ve completed ten pieces and a slim book this year. (The book, to be candid, was begun earlier.) Ten is a nice, round number: one for each finger of the hand, unless you’re Django Reinhardt or Hrithik Roshan. Here’s a round-up of ten things I learned (plus a final bonus one, from the book) this year.

Nov 22, 2024 | samanth.substack.com | Samanth Subramanian

To introduce thisnew story in the New Yorker,a little mea culpa:Years ago, when I was working for a business daily, we decided to publish a short editorial about a UNESCO report on disappearing languages. I wrote the editorial, but the “line” was decided by committee: Three or four of us thought we’d be contrarian and say that, in a globalizing world, it was natural for languages to vanish. And being a business daily, we were obviously pro-globalization.

Nov 18, 2024 | newyorker.com | Samanth Subramanian

In some Indian languages, the word for “language” is bhasha—the vowels long and warm, as in “car” or “tar.” It has a formal weight and a refined spirit. It comes to us from the classical heights of Sanskrit, and it evokes a language with a script and a literature, with newspapers and codified grammar and chauvinists and textbooks. But there is another word, boli.

Nov 18, 2024 | flipboard.com | Samanth Subramanian

1 hour agoRecently, Pakistani TikTok star Imsha Rehman’s alleged private videos were leaked online. Soon after, Rehman deactivated her social media accounts. Now, another influencer and TV personality from Pakistan, Mathira Mohammad, has found herself at the center of a similar controversy, with private …