Kanika Sharma

The Hindu • 30th October 2026

Interview | Author Elif Shafak on how she found a kindred spirit in Gustave Flaubert

At a time when our existence seems reduced to a data point, the words of Turkish-British writer Elif Shafak feel diaphanous, allowing thoughts and emotions to expand into something more. Sometimes, they take the form of a colour, an image or a taste that refuses to disappear. They leave an imprint on the page, making space for human endeavour. Yet, lately, words have also become seeds of divisiveness, usurped by AI and deployed as instruments of distraction.When Shafak found herself in despair,...

Hindustan Times • 16th October 2026

We no longer speak openly about politics: A Wknd chat with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout

We see it in what unfolds as we scroll on our lonely screens.Elizabeth Strout, 70, weaves some of the chaos and division of our times into her new novel, via the character of Artie Dam, a teacher of history, in contemporary America.The Things We Never Say is on the Booker Prize shortlist (the winner will be announced early next month). Strout has previously won the Pulitzer, for Olive Kitteridge (2009), a set of stories about a sharp-tongued woman in Maine.A lot has changed since 2009 and her ne...

Hindustan Times • 2nd October 2026

Micro’s scope: A Wknd chat with epidemiologist Ramanan Laxminarayan

For most of his life, epidemiologist Ramanan Laxminarayan, 55, has devoted his time a world that is too small for the human eye. He has studied microorganisms that talk to each other through signals, exchanging vital information about energy sources and potential dangers – even when they were not genetically related.Within this microscopic world of the petri dish, the senior research scholar at Princeton University, whose work sits at the intersection of public health, economics and infectious d...

The Hindu • 28th September 2026

Review | ‘Small Comfort’ by Ia Genberg is all about the corrupting influence of money

Two people are asked to play Monopoly. Before the game begins, one player is given more money, resources and opportunities to move around the board. The other is left to make do with less. In the end, the richer player is ruder, more callous and less empathetic.This was what a famous experiment by psychologist Paul Piff at the University of California, Berkeley, found in the 2010s. Swedish novelist Ia Genberg examines this revelation by making it the central argument in her anthology, Small Comf...

Hindustan Times • 18th September 2026

How did farmers become so invisible?: Wknd interviews sociologist Maryam Aslany

How did blueberries get there? Why is chocolate fading?At the root of these questions are so many others: What is the true role of land; where should water go; how should we best juggle our need for space, forests, cities and farms?Over and over, as we tussle with these questions, it is the farmer who ends up with less. Less water, land, attention, revenue… certainty.How did a role this vital become so sidelined?For 14 years, Iranian-British sociologist Maryam Aslany, 46, has explored answers to...

Hindustan Times • 11th September 2026

Work, ageing, Sheldon Cooper: Wknd interviews award-winning theoretical physicist Deepak Dhar

The laws of probability didn’t seem to work here.When it came to certain systems — storms, earthquakes, meteors — there was too much at play; too many layers, each one too complex and shaped by too many variables. Who could model or account for that?An answer emerged in the 1980s. A 39-year-old Danish theoretical physicist, Per Bak, came up with something called the sandpile model. (Read on for a bit more on what that is.)Two Indians, Deepak Dhar and Ramakrishna Ramaswamy, took that theory and b...

Hindustan Times • 5th September 2026

Liberalism cannot survive without shared prosperity: Wknd talks to Nobel-winning economist Daron Acemoglu

Much of his research sits at the intersection of economics, history and politics. Why do some nations prosper while others do not? How are institutions formed, what makes some of them “good”, and how do they affect prosperity?In 2024, he won a Nobel Prize, alongside fellow economists Simon Johnson and James A Robinson, for their work on how institutions shape prosperity, and how they in turn are shaped by the motives of those in power (motives that often involve profit).Their research took the s...

Hindustan Times • 28th August 2026

Unpacking secrets of the Indian Ocean: Mahmood Kooria discusses his new book

There’s a bit of a problem with how we study history, says Mahmood Kooria, and it’s limiting what we see.We tend to study what happened on land. But most of the planet is water. And some of this water served as “highways of exchange”, where people met, interacted, traded, invented, sought new horizons and built their fortunes.The story of a place and its people changes when one factors in the seas around them, Kooria says. This is particularly true of India.What we now know as the Indian Ocean h...

The Hindu • 4th August 2026

Review | ‘Super’ by Lindsay Pereira: Chasing the ‘Canadian dream’

Migration is among humanity’s most propulsive acts. From survival, hope to conquest, migration encompasses all shades of a dream. Driven by reinvention, it has long shaped the dreams of Punjab’s youth, for whom Canada has become a near-mythical destination. As immigration increasingly becomes a political fault line, Lindsay Pereira’s latest novel, Super, follows Sukhpreet, a young Sikh determined to cross that border.Sukhpreet first moves to Jalandhar to prepare for the IELTS, joining the convey...

Hindustan Times • 24th July 2026

I write for children who feel invisible, says Patrice Lawrence, UK’s new children’s laureate

Patrice Lawrence knows what it’s like to feel as if the world has no place in it for you.As a child, she spent four years in foster care, raised by a White working-class family until her mother could reclaim her.There were few people of colour in her school. Even the books she loved and escaped into offered little resonance. These were all stories about White people, with Black people mocked, derided and at the fringes, when they appeared at all.“I always felt different… acknowledging that still...

Hindustan Times • 14th July 2026

Laura Spinney: “Widespread literacy has slowed down language evolution”

As I started talking to linguists, archaeologists and geneticists, I realised they were all providing different pieces of the same puzzle. Most people agree that these languages trace back to a single common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. But because it predated writing, people naturally asked: Who spoke this first language? Where did they live? How did they live?In summer 2022, a linguist mentioned the origin story of the Indo-European languages and how research in the field was racing ahead. I...

Hindustan Times • 10th July 2026

Take a bite?: A new cookbook offers a tour of the intriguingly familiar foods of Somalia

It isn’t just the samosa, called sambuus in Somalia.Sambuus, which have a lot in common with the samosa, can be made with egg, poultry, beef. (Khadija Farah for Soomaaliya by Ifrah F Ahmed)There are plenty of “culinary cousins” that link India and this East African country.Somali kitchens brew a beverage quite similar to chai, called shaah. The gelatinous dessert xalwo, made with nutmeg, cardamom and cornstarch, very closely resembles halwa. Paratha has its mirror in the flatbread sabaayad; and...

Hindustan Times • 3rd July 2026

Above the fold: Wknd interviews pathbreaking Indian-Canadian journalist Haroon Siddiqui

Siddiqui’s five-decade career earned him the Order of Canada in 2001, and the Canadian Journalism Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. At 84, he remains Editorial page editor emeritus at the Toronto Star. His memoir, My Name is Not Harry, now out in India as Unapologetic (Southside Books), traces how he has navigated identity, truth and change. Excerpts from an interview.He travelled to Iran in 1979, as 52 American diplomats were held hostage at the US embassy in Tehran. As the Sovie...

Hindustan Times • 29th May 2026

Exit wounds: Ann Patchett talks to Wknd about books, writing, family, and the power of love

Bel Canto (2001), which won the Women’s Prize (then called the Orange Prize for Fiction) and the PEN/Faulkner Award, is about an unlikely friendship between a band of terrorists and an opera singer. In Commonwealth (2016), the most autobiographical of her works, an illicit relationship eventually brings two families together.The author from Nashville has a new book out on Tuesday (June 2). Whistler is about Daphne, a 53-year-old woman who runs into her stepfather, a man her mother was married to...

Vogue India • 21st May 2026

At 85, this feisty Supreme Court advocate still won’t back down from a fight

There are no vestiges of Supreme Court advocate Indira Jaising’s professional life or the landmark cases she had fought over six decades. Nothing about Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation, which led to a landmark judgement being passed in favour of pavement dwellers’ rights; nothing about her role in convincing the court to strike down the Triple Talaq; nothing about the long fight for justice for victims of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. Her living room is instead a picture of tidy miscellany:...

The Hindu • 16th May 2026

Review | The Witch by Marie NDiaye is a darkly absurd tale of motherhood and magic

This is no ordinary vision of a witch. There is no broomstick or cauldron, nor is she a spinster or a widow. Lucie is entirely ordinary, living a most banal existence in this year’s International Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, The Witch, by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump.Immured by her husband’s punishing gaze, Lucie leads a domestic life in suburban France, struggling with her middling powers and diminished role as a mother. Critics have noted that the translation of...

The Hindu • 8th May 2026

Interview | Karan Mahajan on his new novel, The Complex: a post-Partition Punjabi family’s tale

There is something prismatic about remembering. In the mind’s eye, the past refracts, and history stops feeling inevitable. In his latest novel, The Complex (HarperCollins), Karan Mahajan achieves a similar effect, following a post-Partition Punjabi joint family through the upheavals of the 1980s and 90s — from the Mandal Commission to the rise of Hindutva politics. As they navigate these shifts, they emerge as both causes and consequences of a nation in churn.Now based in the U.S., Mahajan retu...

Vogue India • 3rd May 2026

Asako Yuzuki writes women she knows you won’t like. ‘Butter’ and ‘Hooked’ are proof she won’t stop

From her early work, ‘Forget Me, Not Blue’, to the award-winning Butter and now Hooked, Yuzuki has constructed a world where female friendships begin to unfurl. Exchanges between women are taut as they size each other up based on ideas borrowed from men, and compare their bodies and successes in the workplace and at home. In her novels, as it is in the real world, women’s bodies are no longer theirs for pleasure and joy. They become flawed, insatiable and in need of constant correction through d...

Hindustan Times • 18th April 2026

Are you there yet?: Decoding the new maths of adulthood

* Galileo was 19 when he made some of his most dramatic discoveries about the density of matter.* Newton was 23 when he had his Eureka moment about gravity.* Mozart was touring Europe and performing before royalty by the age of six.These were prodigies, certainly. But given how low life expectancy was until the modern era, researchers now believe that a large share of humanity’s most dramatic discoveries—harnessing fire, the wheel, smelting, and plenty more — were likely made by people who were...

Hindustan Times • 4th April 2026

Anne Beate Hovind: “Our relation to time has become so short term”

I commissioned Katie Paterson to do an art project to transform a harbour in Oslo on behalf of property developers. She came to Oslo, did a lot of research and went back to Berlin where she was living at the time. Three days later she called me and said, ‘I have the perfect idea for the public spaces project, but I need to stay in a cabin in the forest first.’I offered her one where she stayed for about a week in the deep forest. Afterwards, she came out and said this is the work: ‘It’s going to...

UpBeat • 2nd April 2026

How women’s unpaid labour in livestock care has become a source of livelihood

At 2,000 metres above sea level, even before the cowbells begin to ring at five in the morning, women in 40 villages around Darlaghat–41 kilometres from Shimla–are already on the move. They milk the cows, then climb the slopes to the nearest road to deliver the milk to an Amritdhara Milk Co-operative van.This daily exchange in these hills is indicative of more than a routine, it is also a reflection of who earns, and how.Women have always been a key part of agriculture, even if their labour has...

Hindustan Times • 20th March 2026

Home is where the hurt is: Talking to Palestinian-American writer Hannah Lillith Assadi

Eventually, in America, he meets Sarah, a Jewish woman whose love brings both refuge and pain. What has it been like to reckon with this legacy? Excerpts from an interview.It traces the journey of a five-year-old Palestinian boy named Sufien from his ancestral home on a hilltop in Safad (now part of Israel) — a place where the family had lived for so many centuries, they had no memory of ever being anywhere else — to a refugee camp in Syria, a tiny flat in Kuwait, then life as a student in Italy...

The Hindu • 20th March 2026

Exiled Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur on her International Booker Prize-nominated novella

In writing Women Without Men (Zanan bedun-e Mardan), Shahrnush Parsipur gave her female characters a freedom that cost her her own. Set against the CIA-backed 1953 coup in Iran, the novella follows five women — a sex worker, a schoolteacher, a menopausal housewife, and two unmarried women — all seeking escape from the religious diktats governing their lives. In the book, virginity is divorced from honour, and shame is cast aside to create identity.The vision was radical for its time. Published i...

Hindustan Times • 13th March 2026

A dystopic Kolkata fast running out of food: Wknd talks to Megha Majumdar about her new book

“It is incredibly sad to read such dire predictions about the future of your hometown,” Majumdar says. Excerpts from an interview.As the plot unfolds, Majumdar the anthropologist’s intricate research glimmers through. The details she weaves into her tale, to indicate how Kolkata got to this point, are inspired by a real-world report released in 2021 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which predicts that Kolkata could be, on average, 4.5 degrees Celsius hotter (than pre-indu...