Strangers Guide

Nov 25, 2024 | strangersguide.com | Stranger’s Guide

Dear Friends,Stranger’s Guide is embarking on a new chapter—one that will bring more original writing, more events and a deeper commitment to you, our community of curious and courageous global citizens. We launched Stranger’s Guide in 2018—in the shadow of Donald Trump’s presidency—with a bold vision: to connect readers across borders, to celebrate our shared human experiences and to explore how politics, power and culture play out in our everyday lives.

Jul 31, 2024 | strangersguide.com | Kavita Puri

This piece is published in collaboration with Coda Story as part of the Complicating Colonialism issue. In the middle of the Second World War, in the dying days of the British Empire, an estimated three million people died from hunger and disease linked to famine. The victims were Indians, but also British subjects. The Bengal famine of 1943 stands as one of the most devastating losses of civilian life on the Allied side.

Jul 17, 2024 | strangersguide.com | Shougat Dasgupta

My father, Swapan Dasgupta, was born near Calcutta in April 1947, just four months before India became an independent nation. By 1947, India had been transformed under British rule from a global center of economic production into an exemplar of deprivation, of hunger, of sickness, and of dire, desperate poverty. Its economic progress in the first decades after independence—until reforms were executed around 1991—was only ever fitful, sluggish.

Jul 12, 2024 | strangersguide.com | Salar Abdoh

This piece is published in collaboration with Coda Story as part of the Complicating Colonialism issue. All my life I’ve known versions of blindness. It began at a very young age when, from certain angles I would see two of everything – two homes, two cars, two of the same boy in kindergarten who wanted to fight me and did, two mothers, two of the Turkish dayah whom I always considered my real mother. Blindness can be seeing too much of things, just as much as seeing too little.

Jul 1, 2024 | strangersguide.com | Isobel Cockerell

This piece is published in collaboration with Coda Story as part of the Complicating Colonialism issue. It was a late spring evening in Devon, England, in May 2021. Even before we saw the satellites, the party had become surreal: it was one of the first gatherings in the region since the pandemic had begun. We were camping in tipis in a field overlooking the Jurassic Coast, the ocean thundering below. Inside the biggest tent, people were singing, smoking, shouting. The evening was unraveling.