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Kanika Sharma

Independent Features Journalist and Writer

 

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 •

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 •

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 •

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...
Hindustan Times •

Maybe AI will create a new style all its own: Wknd interviews music composer Steve Barakatt

He’s never liked the idea of music being divided into genres. It divides people, says Steve Barakatt, 51. “And I believe that music is meant to communicate and unite. Inclusivity is its true essence.” Barakatt, a renowned Lebanese-Canadian composer and pianist, is currently in the midst of a world tour to promote his most recent album, Néoréalité (2021; French for New Reality). A performance at the Royal Opera House made Mumbai his 27th stop in an extensive tour that began in Serbia in 2022 and...
Hindustan Times •

John Vaillant: “Nature will burn the earth or flood it to make us stop”

In 2023, nearly 12 million hectares, almost as big as Nicaragua, burned to ash, emitting a copious amount of carbon dioxide. We are also losing forest cover, which is making the planet hotter. Why are wildfires becoming frequent and more lethal? What is happening is a global recalibration of forest and grassland regimes in a painful, uneven, patchwork fashion. The new fire regime can’t be stopped by us, which is a frightening prospect. In the northern hemisphere, we are seeing powerful fires th...
Vogue India •

“I was bullied for being brown”: Actor Avantika Vandanapu and author Perumal Murugan discuss their school years

Perumal Murugan, 58, is the teacher everyone dreams of having. Like John Keating in Dead Poets Society (1989) and Miss Honey in Matilda (1996), the award-winning author is also a college professor of the most unusual kind. So much so that former students still ring him up to this day, reminiscing about staying with him under thatched roofs when they had nowhere else to go.When actor Avantika Vandanapu, 20, read Murugan’s latest book, an emotional dedication to the pupils he loves and is loved by...
Hindustan Times •

Jay Lemery: “Treating climate medicine as if it were a scam is horrible”

How do you tend to a farmer whose kidneys have shrivelled up as his body endured punishing heatwaves and lack of clean water, making him a lifelong patient? Or a young adult who comes in breathless with no history of asthma? Our brains may deny climate change, but our bodies know and show how climate change is altering us by way of disease. Climate change is no longer just about extreme disasters like wildfires, glaciers, or species extinction, but our bodies that labour for breath through the y...
Vogue India •

Banu Mushtaq wrote ‘Heart Lamp’ for 33 years. Now, it’s nominated for the International Booker Prize

The rebellious writer has blazed a path in a rural Muslim community that most do not understand. She attended university when most of her peers were tying the knot in their teens, married for love at 26, became a reporter for the award-winning vernacular paper Lankesh Patrike, then an activist in several protest literary circles including Bandaya Sahitya and eventually an advocate; not to miss her two terms in the municipal council. The daunting prospect of owning her writerly voice only came to...
Hindustan Times •

Pause and effect: Author Pico Iyer talks silences and wildfires, in an exclusive Wknd interview

It’s an unusual thing to hear from a prolific writer, but Pico Iyer, 68, says he measures joy not in words as much as silences. He was 34, adds the British-born author and journalist of Indian origin, when a California wildfire burned his childhood home to the ground in 1991. His mother was away from her home when she lost everything; he fled with just what he was wearing, and their cat. With nowhere to go, a friend suggested a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur. There, he says, after journeying a...
Hindustan Times •

Vice in our veins: The science behind the sins that make us human

A new book by the English neurologist Dr Guy Leschziner suggests the reason we don’t evolve out of our “dark sides” is that they once helped us live on as a species. They were, in fact, so helpful that the fast-learning, fast-growing human brain became hard-wired for gluttony, envy, pride, wrath, greed, sloth and lust. In his book, Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human (November; HarperCollins), Dr Leschziner, 50, studies brain scans, case studies, genetic findings and research papers fr...
Hindustan Times •

Love and loss: Why David Nicholls can’t stop writing about romance

Reading David Nicholls’s books is like being in the most intense relationship. It is love at first sight; you’ll full-on crush over every flawed character, every fated meet-cute. You’ll die a little inside with every twist. You’ll replay scenes in your head long after the closing chapter.

Reading David Nicholls’s books is like being in the most intense relationship. It is love at first sight; you’ll full-on crush over every flawed character, every fated meet-cute. You’ll die a little inside wit...
Vogue India •

Three Indian female historians discuss how it is not only the future that is female but also the past

History, by default, has been a male dominion. Tucked inside school textbooks are tales of valour and conquests, wars and spoils, almost always performed by men. Reading about fearless souls striding onto the battlefield or flouting societal expectations, be it Akbar the Great, Bhagat Singh or Kabir, has always felt manly.After all, who has ever got their blood pumping over Mirabai’s Sita-like devotion or Sarojini Naidu’s role in the freedom struggle with her docile title, the ‘Nightingale of In...
Hindustan Times •

Mark Haddon: “Death is the engine that sits at the centre of all fiction”

There are dogs and then there are monstrous human beings. I like how the stories flip the meaning of that phrase around. I had a heart bypass five years ago now, which kind of put the spanner in the works. The stories have been pulled together and then edited piecemeal though I’ve picked old stories. Some of these ideas were sitting around in my notes book for a very, very long time like 20 to 30 years. As for the recall, it is going to happen all the time, isn’t it? I am extremely thankful that...
Hindustan Times •

Orbital is an ode to Earth as our home: A Wknd interview with author Samantha Harvey

The book follows six astronauts aboard a fictionalised International Space Station, through a single day (16 orbits, of 90 minutes each). Adding a layer of nostalgia to the intricate view she builds, is the fact that, in the real world, the ISS will soon be decommissioned, and the skies are set to get much busier as private corporations take increasingly to space, looking for new worlds to draw from, and possibly call home. “This is a book we need now, but it may also be a book we’ll need foreve...
Good Food Movement •

The capital has a superbug problem | Good Food Movement

As the national capital, Delhi may be India's seat of power, but it doesn't have complete control over its own health--an aspect that is frequently affected by the actions of its neighbours. Be it the thick smog that envelops the capital and brings the life of its residents to a grinding halt during winter, or the hidden manner in which the city ignorantly consumes antibiotic-treated food and water. Similarly, Delhi may not be home to pharmaceutical manufacturing factories, but neighbouring stat...
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