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Kanika Sharma

Independent Features Journalist and Writer

 

Hindustan Times •

‘The world is far stranger than we imagine it to be’: A Wknd interview with Amitav Ghosh

For him, these realms in which fact and make-believe are braided together form ever-present parallel dimensions of a kind, since no two versions are ever quite the same. Ghosh’s new book, Ghost-Eye, due for release on December 15, works to extend the idea of what constitutes our past, invoking concepts of reincarnation and past life. At the heart of this narrative is Varsha, a three-year-old girl from a family of vegetarian Marwaris in Kolkata, who suddenly refuses to eat anything but fish, and...
Nature •

I encourage women to claim their space in astrophysics and beyond

Theoretical astrophysicist Debarati Chatterjee has always seen gender for what it is — a social construct. Despite witnessing domestic violence as a child, experiencing sexual harassment as an undergraduate and a PhD student, and being one of the small proportion (around 20%) of astronomers in the world who are women, she hasn’t let her gender define her career. Leaving her home country of India to start a postdoctoral position in Germany in 2010, she saw that prejudices based on race, class and...
Hindustan Times •

‘Agra is me trying to hold up a mirror and say: This is who we are now. It’s time to talk about this’: Kanu Behl

There is often a tenderness to slice-of-life stories set in non-metropolitan India. People lean on each other; the light is tinged with gold. Expect none of that in Agra. This a world that is breathless, brutal and relentless. The second feature film by Kanu Behl, 45, has made news for how few screens it has been given (a number that is slowly rising, with rising interest in the movie). It has made news for premiering at Cannes, as Behl’s first film Titli did, in 2014.What it should be making ne...
Hindustan Times •

The eras tour: A Wknd chat with Vajra Chandrasekera, author of the award-winning Rakesfall

Time twists, bends and folds back on itself, in Rakesfall. The protagonist, who goes by different names in different epochs, steps through her various lives at will; travels through worlds of the living and the dead, and through domains in which the two overlap so densely that courts must rule, in surreal judgements, on how they may best coexist. It is a wild ride, in other words; one that sweeps through dystopias to end with some pale hope. All of which is why the Sri Lankan writer Vajra Chandr...
The Hindu •

In conversation with Ledia Xhoga, author of Booker-longlisted novel Misinterpretation

To be human is to empathise. Or is it? Can we even call it a binding impulse when it was barely recognised until the past century? For most of our long history, empathy was less seen as a moral instinct than as an aesthetic impulse — something stirred by art or nature, by the elusive smile on the Mona Lisa or the sweep of birds breaking and re-forming across the sky. Only recently have we begun to understand it as a way of knowing one another, of seeing more clearly. Yet, clarity can deceive. Se...
UpBeat •

AI In Reproductive Health: Can Chatbots Promote Safe Abortions Among Rural Indian Women?

“In 2020, when Covid-19 hit, our youth leaders – who educate young people, especially women on sexual and reproductive health (SRH) – had to pause their routine visits to the villages. We started receiving phone calls, sometimes frantic ones, asking for guidance, especially on safe abortion practices. That’s when we thought – why not a chatbot,”’ says Anisha Aggarwal, senior director, strategy and development, Ipas Development Foundation (IDF). Since 2001, IDF has been working with national and...
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 •

Get to know... Zarna Garg

Oh my God, the other day, somebody called me an author.

Bollywood pop mostly, especially Where’s the Party Tonight? from KANK.

A Birkin bag, not after making a video trolling it.

A cup of adrak chai, as always.

Yoga socks. I don’t actually do yoga, but I like the socks.

Take the medical school entrance exam and do something real.

A hot dumb guy. I am tired of the brainiacs.

At the launch of my Hulu premiere, I met America’s top-rated radio personality Ira Glass.

I like to yell at everybo...
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 •

Get to know... Abhishek Banerjee

Stree 2 becoming the biggest Hindi blockbuster of all time.

The pandemic. Just when my acting career started, work stopped.

A laptop. A phone can do everything a laptop can.

A Starbucks Frappuccino with an extra espresso shot and oat milk.

Don’t change anything. But go to the gym regularly.

Eating this special Maggi noodle variation my mom makes. It is a cross between Maggi and chowmein.

Meeting Mr Bachchan on the set of Section 84.

Steal all the great ideas from the future and come back...
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 •

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...
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Email: kanika4444@gmail.com