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Always a blessed relief to hold the manuscript of a NEW BOOK in your hand. This one, on the fragile undersea cables that carry our data, took 2 years of research…
Samanth Subramanian
4,740 posts
Samanth Subramanian
@samanth_s
Ex-@qz. Words in @gdnlongread @newyorker, @NYTMag, @WIRED and others. My JBS Haldane biography is out now. Newsletter: samanth.substack.com
- For ~a year, I've dug into the Hindu right's impact on Bollywood, to find out how the vauntedly liberal industry - directors, platforms, writers, actors - is responding. Nearly 50 interviews later, here's the piece. This is not a pretty picture... [1]
- Not one Indian writer, cricket or otherwise, has shown the appropriate level of anger / contempt for the sickening worship of Modi at the Ahmedabad Test. Fortunately, there's Gideon Haigh.
- Trump's election is "a sickening event in the history of the United States." David Remnick minces no words: newyorker.com/news/news-desk…
- May all the crimes you encounter in 2017 be only as serious as this one, out of Ireland:
- We’d be glad to send over a chap for a couple of hours to do a half-assed job of splitting up your country.India in 1947 had rather less difficulty gaining its independence than we are having in 2017 leaving the Brussels empire. Time for Boris to go the full Gandhi.
- Some PR guru has clearly been telling Bollywood's wealthy that, in a poor economy, they're seen as too elite, too out of touch. Do something that shows your ability to connect with the common man, they must have been urged. And so, with great unoriginality, they obeyed: (1)
- A BJP story: In the lobby of the LIC office in Dharwad, the employees’ union decided long ago to install a whiteboard, on which they’d write the day’s news headlines. For many years, government spooks would drop by sometimes to take a look at the board….
- There’s still no political opposition; there’re still scads of voters who want a Hindu India. But the protests in Dec. have been the most heartening moment in six years. The sapling still stands. The soil is resisting. I write for @TheAtlantic:
- The odds that Indian authorities launch an investigation into this are, as usual, nil.An FT analysis supports longstanding claims that Adani Group has been inflating fuel costs for billions of dollars of coal, leading to millions of Indians overpaying for electricity on.ft.com/3RVZ3dD
- Bloody thrilling. Can’t wait for the sequel. (Audio On)
00:00 - Columnists are free to have opinions. But it’s disgraceful that, at a time of panic, @livemint will allow someone with no medical background to dispense misinformation. “Indians have the toughest immune system” is not a scientific truth. This isn’t what op-eds are meant to do.
- In this week's @NewYorker: My profile of Ganesh Devy, who assembled the first Indian survey of languages in a century, and who now lives in Dharwad as a protest against forces who will kill writers and impose religions and languages [1]
- Replying to @samanth_sI found: - stacks of killed film and TV projects, at various levels of development - absurd rules imposed by studios to keep themselves safe - a thriving ecosystem of creators in lockstep with the BJP - an RSS media unit that liaises with Bollywood... [2]
