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“Identity Isn’t What They Box Us Into”: The Resilient Heart of Homebound
Once in a while, a film reminds you of our collective humanity, forcing us to enquire about the world and the life we live, shaking us awake. Homebound (2025), directed by Neeraj Ghaywan, is one such film.
Atharva Salve
Nov 4


Literary-Star Fiery Princess: On Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me
Mother Mary Comes To Me insists that it is an article of dissent. From its flaming red hardcover gazes a young Arundhati Roy, beedi in mouth—a brand aesthetic around a politics of defiance, carefully curated by designers at the publishing giant, Penguin.
Aishani Misra
Oct 29


Chronicles of the Untranslated: Bringing India’s Non-Fiction Voices to the Centre
A collaboration between The Ashoka Centre for Translation and Penguin Random House, Chronicles was introduced in April 2024 as a series of non-fiction translations “aimed at bringing creative-critical textual narratives from various Indian languages to English.” It also seeks to function as a living archive and resource as it gathers voices that might otherwise remain dispersed across India’s linguistic map.
Rohan Wagle
Oct 9


Found in Translation: A Student’s Reflections from Bhashavaad 2.0
On the 29th and 30th of August, the second edition of Bhashavaad: National Translation Conference took place, organised by the Ashoka Centre for Translation in partnership with the New India Foundation, in an effort to bring scholars, writers, translators and publishers together.
Anoushka Kumar
Oct 4


"My Work Will Not Satisfy What This Institution Has Been Selling": An Artist's War on Elite India
At Ashoka University, Siddhesh Gautam delivers a talk that challenges seventy-five years of cultural apartheid in Indian design education.
Maya Ribeiro
Sep 29


On Performing Invisibility: the Heart of Twitter Community at Ashoka
Micro-blogging on platforms like Twitter (Now ‘X’) is often anonymised. You go by a nickname, and never include a picture or your...
Uditi Mahindra
Sep 24


Dhadak 2: Bollywood’s Bold Reckoning with Caste and Love
Directed by Shazia Iqbal, Dhadak 2 is the Bollywood adaptation of Mari Selvaraj’s well-received Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal (2018).
Atharva Salve
Aug 26


Cut From the Same Cloth: CLAD and HerCampus
A reel by a club at Ashoka may just be a few seconds of stimulation in the course of a doom scroll, but the aphorism ‘a picture speaks a thousand words’ holds for a reason—a video, then? Arguably, even more. The seemingly insignificant reel becomes important to us all, for this bite of information plays a vital role in how our institution is perceived. The number of times a friend from another university has sent me a reel from HerCampus or CLAD is, well, countless.
Giya Sood
Aug 19


What Banu Mushtaq's Booker Means for India
On May 21st, author Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, a collection of twelve short stories, originally written in Kannada and later translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi, won the coveted International Booker Prize, becoming the first ever Kannada book to do so. It came as a rebuke to India’s literary establishment.
Nikita Kalra
Jul 30


Far From Here, Far From Home: A Reading of Mira Nair’s "So Far From India"
Displacement, migration, or even just the act of moving out, was never simply about crossing borders or the unsettling of the familiar that follows, but also the shifting and suppression of desires.
Ayush Rawat
Jul 2
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