When the burqa debate was raging across the world, a young Pakistani women’s rights activist, who doesn’t wear a headscarf as a rule, travelled to Jalalabad in Afghanistan to see for herself what it meant to wear one. This is her story. Gulalai Ismail, a 24-year-old university student in Islamabad, needed to go to Afghanistan […]
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Author: Subir Ghosh
Phoolan Devi: The Politics Of Rage
This write-up was originally penned for a friend’s online satire mag way back in August 2001 but re-publishing it seems to be a good idea. My colleagues were exhilarated. They were agitated too. So the woman who, they claimed, had killed hundreds and got away with it, had finally been gunned down. Quite rightly so, […]
A Requiem For A Tigress
It happens with all journalists. You work on a story, watch it slowly build up, wait for an opportune moment, and finally the story never sees the light of day, for whatever reason. I have never cursed myself for stories that have ended up dead, for that was always a frustrating part of the game; […]