A year of living and traveling between Delhi and Gurgaon quietly revealed how identity, silence, and everyday struggles shape the lives of many people in ways the wider world rarely notices There are many struggles people carry quietly, challenges that others rarely see or understand. One very practical example I have observed during my year living and traveling between Delhi and Gurgaon is the experience of the Muslim community. Across the world, many Muslims live with an invisible pressure: the constant expectation to prove their patriotism, to show that they are not extremists, to defend their identity again and again. It is a burden that others seldom have to carry.One moment that stayed with me happened in the metro. I saw a young woman walking out of the train carrying a kirpan, a ceremonial dagger traditionally worn by Sikhs. It made me pause and think about how differently symbols and identities are perceived. In India, discussions about identity often reveal deep layers ...
I accidentally watched Madathy (2019), and it didn’t feel like a movie—it felt like a wound being gently but firmly opened. The film doesn’t scream. It doesn’t sermonize. It walks—through the lives of the so-called untouchables, through women’s bodies turned into sites of control and pleasure, through nature, animals, silence, and suppressed rage. The donkey, the wild, the land—every metaphor exposes how society treats those it deems “lesser.” It covers women with dignity and exposes men without mercy. What’s striking is what the film doesn’t fully touch—the brahmanical canvas—yet even without naming it directly, the rot is unmistakable. Madathy protests reality simply by showing it as it is. And then I look around today. We claim the cow is sacred, yet fellow human beings are killed in its name. Does our ministers welcome foreign delegates with cow dung and cow urine rituals? so I ask: If it is culture when performed for power, why is it violence when questioned for humanity? Ind...