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Kanika Sharma

Independent Features Journalist and Writer

 

The Hindu •

Interview | Andrew Miller on his Booker-shortlisted novel, The Land in Winter

Two-time Booker Prize nominee Andrew Miller plucks on words as if they are strings on a guitar. In almost all his works, rich and taut emotions linger long afterwards. In this year’s Booker-nominated title, The Land in Winter (published by Sceptre), Britain has turned gelid in one of its longest and coldest winters in history.It is 1962, and the cracks in local doctor Eric Parry’s marriage start to appear while his pregnant wife Irene fights listlessness by planning a Boxing Day party. She finds...
Hindustan Times •

Richard Osman: “Crime as a genre transcends genre”

When I’m a reader if I am reading a series that I love, I don’t want to wait two or three years for the next book. So, I write a book a year. With the film, I literally did not get involved for one second. The film is someone else’s vision of the Thursday Murder Club, which is lovely. But I like to work hard and want readers to find a new adventure for the Thursday Murder Club or We Solve Murders every year. That feels like the least I can do. Do you have any writerly struggles since each book...
Hindustan Times •

Saints and sensibility: An exhibition in London traces the evolution of our idols

In the beginning, Ganesha was many, many nature spirits called Vinayakas or Ganeshavaras, from which the modern elephant-headed deity evolved. What boggles the mind is that in all these years, his defining features – the snout, sweetmeats and of course, the round potbelly – have stayed the same. And yet if you see all around, he has changed and how. The British Museum’s ongoing exhibition, Ancient India: Living Traditions, in London, captures this evolution and permanence in sacred art in Hindui...
Hindustan Times •

Innovation starts with empathy: A Wknd chat with teenaged innovator Gitanjali Rao

“What is lead,” Gitanjali Rao swallowed the last of her pasta and asked her parents. She was nine years old and had just heard about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, on the news. Children in parts of that city, not that far from her home in Lone Tree, Colorado, were drinking water contaminated with lead, and nothing was being done about it. Shouldn’t she at least try to help? By the age of 11, she had taken her first steps to do so, designing a home-test kit that could potentially analyse wa...
Hindustan Times •

And then there were none: Wknd interviews Palestinian author Ibtisam Azem

What is the fate of Gaza? What will it be? In the 77 years since the formation of Israel, there have been no clear answers. The newest plan for its future envisions another gleaming city in the desert, one that is being called a “Riviera of the Middle East”. Images from the news show starving children and bombed-out hospitals. A media tent has been bombed and journalists killed. There is now talk of Israel seizing Gaza City. Eleven years ago, when the Palestinian journalist and writer Ibtisam Az...
Hindustan Times •

There are always ways to resist: Wknd interviews dystopian author Laila Lalami

In Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami’s new novel, The Dream Hotel, pre-crime surveillance has stretched its tentacles into our sleeping brains. Lalami’s heroine, Sara Hussein, is a researcher with the Getty Museum and a busy mother of toddler twins. She is returning to the US from a work trip to London when she is detained at the airport and told that her dreams have raised her risk score too high. She is then transported to a “retention centre”.These centres are privately run and have been...
Nature •

How a bipolar diagnosis benefits my research

For neuroscientist Imtiaz Zafar, researching bipolar disorder is both a professional occupation and a lifelong study of an experienced reality. Zafar found his mind unravelling in psychosis, paranoia and depression during his doctorate. He is now a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) in Bengaluru, India, where, almost a decade ago, he was a patient. He and his co-workers now investigate the effect of mood stabilizers and antipsychotics at the molecu...
Hindustan Times •

Claudia de Rham: “The notion of time is not absolute”

It was always clear in my mind. When I started writing the book, it became clear that there could never have been anything else. I think gravity is fun and almost teasing us, right? It’s always there all around us, and because we know it’s going to be something we can’t avoid, it pushes us to challenge it. We all like to play with it by dropping things and seeing if we can prevent them from falling.From the point of view of theoretical physics, what I like about it is its beautiful symmetry. It’...
Hindustan Times •

The X factor: An Indian has cracked the code to randomness in the virtual world

Roll the dice, and the outcome could be anything between one and six. Such randomness fills our world. Step into the binary reality of computers, though, and randomness becomes a rare resource, much sought after and largely unobtainable. In the structured world of software programs, even computers tasked with generating a random result end up following a pattern of some kind. The closest they can come to true randomness is something called pseudo-randomness, where the patterns aren’t easily visi...
Hindustan Times •

Year of the... dragon?: Yuan Yang’s new book explores the flip side of China’s boom

What is it like being part of the “China story”, one of 1.4 billion in an economy that has grown 3,000% since the 1980s? What do survival and success look like? How does young China cope with the added weight of a regime that treats resistance as treason? What lessons could their experience hold for the rest of us? British-Chinese writer Yuan Yang, 35, investigates these questions in her book, Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China (2024).A former Financial Times (FT) journalist, Yang...
Hindustan Times •

I spent years trying to be the black sheep of my family: Jeet Thayil on his deeply personal new book

It begins with his father, the journalist TJS George, flying from Bombay to Cochin in the 1950s, to visit Ammu George, a teacher he is set to marry. Against convention, he wants to privately meet her once before the wedding. The book takes off from there, merging fact and fiction, memoir, travelogue and supernatural saga in mind-bending ways. The reader isn’t meant to know which is which. “I want you to wonder… to keep guessing,” Thayil says. Fragments of postcards, letters and photographs add t...
Hindustan Times •

Master of disguise: Meet the inventor of a state-of-the-art invisibility cloak

In some ways, he is himself the stuff of science-fiction. For thousands of years, dating to ancient Greek and Welsh myths, then sci-fi and the worlds of HG Wells and Harry Potter, storytellers and scientists have toyed with the idea of the invisibility cloak. Wells, who foresaw the aircraft and army tank, atomic bomb and Wikipedia, wrote of a scientist committed to invisibility in The Invisible Man (1897). This scientist learnt how to change the way light reflected off his body.In Canada, George...
Hindustan Times •

Gangs, exploding fingers, black markets: Check out the wild afterlife of trash

An empty packet of chips from the US, a diaper discarded in Germany and a plastic bottle from the Netherlands have all ended up with rice farmers-turned-trash miners in Indonesia. Primeval forests are being razed in parts of that country to make space for “trash towns”. Since 1992, this chain of islands has been “processing” thousands of tonnes of plastic waste a year, with the mounds turning fields barren and grey. In just one example, in the village of Gedangrowo in East Java, all 150 families...
Hindustan Times •

Sam Leith: ‘Read what you enjoy’

It struck me that children’s literature was a slightly neglected field. I look back and think I’d made my whole career about writing, reading and thinking about books, including interviewing authors. All of that started because it rested on my own childhood reading. It also struck me that children’s literature is seen in many ways. It’s dismissed as less important than the grown-up stuff, ‘simple, unsophisticated and marginally important’. I felt strongly that the opposite was the case. These...
Hindustan Times •

Bug, MD: Meet the surgeons and doctors of the wild

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even hibernating bears do it. They self-medicate, and they do it better than us. Bears, for instance, eat willow bark after their long winter snooze. Rich in salicin, the bark helps cleanse the bear’s system and ease the stiffness and aches that may have set in, during the still winter months. Incidentally, salicylic acid drawn from salicin is used in our painkillers too; it’s helped us make aspirin since 1899. Now to more dramatic examples. Florida carpenter ants perfor...
Hindustan Times •

Stephen Greenblatt: “Shakespeare is like an enormous planet Jupiter”

When I was at the university, the overwhelmingly dominant approach to literature and culture was via New Criticism, which I had a deep immersion into. We were told that we shouldn’t be interested in anything outside the text. I remember reading Alexander Pope, and coming across an extremely misogynistic and unpleasant reference to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. And I said, “Who is Lady Mary Worley Montagu?” I was told that wasn’t a relevant question. In the 1960s, after I graduated from Yale, I went...
Frontline •

How India Loves: Rituparna Chatterjee Maps Modern Relationships, Trauma, and the Search for Healing

Published : May 13, 2025 15:29 IST - 8 MINS READ Five years ago, when author and journalist Rituparna Chatterjee penned The Water Phoenix: A Memoir of Childhood Abuse, Healing and Forgiveness—about the sexual abuse she underwent at six—little did she know that it would transform her into a confidante for thousands across India. Her vulnerability resonated deeply with readers. “I suffered from borderline schizophrenia, and death by suicide was just another thing. I’ve been attempting suicide s...
Hindustan Times •

The thing is...: Wknd interviews Selim Khandakar, an unusual collector of everyday objects

Many have hobbies. Some have obsessions. What Selim Khandakar feels is a pure, unbridled desire for objects. Just before a cyclone hit his mud house in Kelepara village in the Hooghly district of West Bengal in 2021, Khandakar spent hours checking on his collection, tucking hundreds of things — perfume bottles, transistor radios, gas stoves, toy cars, pens, plastic dolls, lighters, bead necklaces, miniature paintings, old newspapers, letters, cigarette boxes, albums of stamps and coins — into cr...
Hindustan Times •

‘For us physicists, beauty is a new idea that unifies and explains’

It was the one about Satyendra Nath Bose, Einstein and a new theory on photon behaviour. “It was absolutely amazing to me that someone could, just from pure thought, sitting alone at the University of Dhaka, come up with something as fundamental as the concept of bosons, and send ripples through the world,” Jain says. That story marked the start of his love affair with physics. Jain is now 65 and a condensed-matter physicist at Pennsylvania State University. He recently won the 2025 Wolf Prize (...
Hindustan Times •

James Bradley: “The ocean shapes the world”

I thought about the idea 25 years ago where I wanted to use the ocean to think about questions of history, environment and our relationship to the natural world. Obviously, the ocean shapes the world. It underpins the carbon and water cycles and is absolutely fundamental to the climate system. But the ocean also shapes the world in less obvious ways. Shipping is the global economy’s engine and enables the extraction systems that global capitalism depends upon. International trade doesn’t exist w...
Hindustan Times •

The state we’re in: Author Rana Dasgupta talks awards, AI, and the decline of the nation-state

Tussling with a new book about the failure of the nation-state, British writer Rana Dasgupta, 53, was feeling like anything but a winner, when he got the call telling him that he had in fact won the 2025 Windham-Campbell prize for non-fiction. “It was a complete surprise,” he says. Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi (2014) was released 11 years ago. This acknowledgement of his body of work came at just the right time, though, he says. A time when he was wrestling with whether ther...
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