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Kanika Sharma

Independent Features Journalist and Writer

 

Hindustan Times •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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...
The Spectator •

Kiran Desai: ‘All cultures are rooted in magic’

It wasn’t until a painting arrived in her post, a gift from the Italian artist Francesco Clemente, that Kiran Desai’s latest novel – The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny – came into being, eventually finding its way onto last year’s Booker Prize shortlist.


The haunting artwork from Clemente’s 108-watercolours series, titled Emblems of Transformation, depicted a black, faceless, eyeless deity adorned with jewels, suffused with ochre, with a heart for an abdomen at the centre of its body. Drawn to...
Vogue India •

Sunita Williams knows exactly what she wants to do post-retirement

Like a character in an Arundhati Roy novel, I wait by the silver-green backwaters of Kozhikode. The leafy riverbank is hushed, save for a lone boatman dipping his oars into the water,­ sending ripples fanning out like rays of the sun. Soon, voices drift closer. I turn and spot her, emerging from behind slanting coconut fronds, her hand extended.The first thing I notice about Sunita Williams is her smile: sunny and wide enough to reassure people around the world when her eight-day mission stretch...
Hindustan Times •

Mine craft: Inside the rush for in-space manufacturing

Let’s take those questions one at a time.For years, space, by which we mean the International Space Station (ISS) and other manned laboratories in Low Earth Orbit, has been largely a place of small-scale experiments (on animals ranging from mice and fish to bacteria), and attempts at off- world agriculture and air and water recycling, much of it focused on eventual inter-planetary travel.But as the ISS era draws to a close(check out the Wknd special on how this global effort is being decommissio...
Nature •

How a bipolar diagnosis benefits my research

For this neuroscientist, researching bipolar disorder is both a professional occupation and a lifelong study of an experienced reality. They found their mind unravelling in psychosis, paranoia and depression during their doctorate. They are now a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) in Bengaluru, India, where, almost a decade ago, they were a patient.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-01848-9

Updates & Corrections...
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...
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Email: kanika4444@gmail.com