Bhavya Dore

A generation of Europeans is now returning to Sri Lanka, a country from which they were adopted as children, to search for their birth mothers. What they learn about their families, and themselves, has deep consequences.
Wouter Dijkstra always knew he had two mothers: his Dutch adoptive mother and his Sri Lankan birth mother. In September 2020, he found out he had three.
Almost a year to the day his Sri Lankan mother died, Wouter got a call from a woman named Amanda Janssen, an acquaintance a...

Sri Lanka – In 1996, 14-year-old Dewi Chandrika Bruins travelled with her family to Sri Lanka, where in an airy school room in the town of Avissawella she met a thin, shy woman.
This woman, a social worker told the teenager, is the woman who gave birth to you.
For Bruins, who had been adopted by a Dutch couple when she was three months old, this meeting should have been the crescendo of her search for her roots. It was, however, the start of an unravelling.
The encounter...

In 1878, Bombay University completed construction on a dazzling addition to the colonial city’s skyline: a 280-foot clock tower. Built in the Venetian Gothic style, the Big Ben–inspired structure was the tallest at the time in the city that would come to be known as Mumbai, with clock faces in each direction. It was right in the heart of the developing town, bursting from the surrounding trees on campus, with the sea not far away. There was just one prickly issue: No one could agree on what t...

Through April and May, government figures of COVID-19 deaths and infections were suspiciously low from the populous Indian state of Gujarat, north of Mumbai. The reported numbers were sometimes as low as in the single digits in major cities, even as local hospitals and crematoria were overflowing. Like most reporters, Yogen Joshi, a senior journalist in the city of Baroda, with the Gujarati newspaper Gujarat Samachar, knew the official data was unreliable.
So how could he investigate the true...

MUMBAI (RNS) — As COVID-19 infections rise in India, the local and national governments’ decision to allow a shortened edition of a festival known as Kumbh Mela is being scrutinized as a cause for some of the spread of the virus but also a sign of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP-led government favoring Hindu beliefs over safety.
Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival that takes place on the banks of the Ganges River in Haridwar, in the hill state of Uttarakhand, was held through April, with two of i...

MUMBAI (RNS) — In India, the country with the world’s second-largest Muslim population, jihad can come in many forms. At least, that’s what the Hindu right would have you believe.
The transformation of the term jihad — which in the Islamic Scripture refers to “struggle” or “striving” — into a specter of Islamic takeover began a decade ago in the southern states of Kerala and Karnataka, when Muslim men were accused of mounting an organized campaign to lure non-Muslim women into marriage and fo...

International air operations draw professionals across countries, ethnicities and linguistic groups. For the most part, the radiotelephony, their technical chatter, is unremarkable. After all, when air traffic control tells you to steer your plane to 17,000 feet, you simply follow those instructions, right? No one notices it because it works.
But language is a notoriously tricky instrument. When it goes wrong, 300,000kg hunks of metal may plummet from the sky. Airplanes may crash. People may ...

nand Kaper was born in Bombay in October 1976, to an unwed mother in a small private hospital. His birth was never officially registered. When he was nine months old, a Dutch couple adopted him from an orphanage, making Kaper one of about 1,100 children adopted from abroad to the Netherlands that year.
Kaper, now an elementary school teacher, had a happy childhood in the small Dutch city of Apeldoorn, but as he grew older, he began to have more questions about his roots. Since 2002, he has re...

Every word matters in a public health emergency. But how do you distil essential pandemic information for a nation of 1.3 billion people who speak in thousands of different tongues?
India has 22 official languages, and more than 19,500 languages or dialects spoken as mother tongues, according to census data. Of these, 121 languages have more than 10,000 speakers. The most widely spoken Indian languages include Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Telugu, though all academic scientific work takes place ...

How the pandemic is affecting healthcare in India

Nothing goes viral like a virus. Unless it’s a video of Ramdas Athawale chanting “Go Corona Go”. On March 10, the Union minister organised an event to destroy the virus, simply by telling it to leave. The joke had already written itself, it only needed to be set to tune. Anup K.R. got to work. On March 15, he released a remixed version that has been seen 1.8 million times, splicing Athawale’s chanting with original rap lyrics. “It was a trending topic at the time,” he says. “Even before the r...

MUMBAI—Worried about the coronavirus? Well, just turn to the ever-useful cow. On March 2, Suman Haripriya, an elected member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said that cow urine and cow dung could be used to combat the outbreak. Chakrapani Maharaj, a Hindu leader, told a news site he would be organizing an event to educate people on the use of cow products to fight the disease.
Those aren’t the only remedies from the Hindu-nationalist toolbox. Baba Ramdev, a popular guru, told a te...

Former badminton ace Jwala Gutta opens up on her new academy, having an opinion, and never staying quiet

AT THE TWENTIETH EDITION of Stone+Tec, an international trade fair for the natural-stone industry, held at the German city of Nürnberg in June 2018, attendees received a curious invitation. A release bearing the logos of the Indian government and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights invited them to a press conference to highlight the “Non Prevalence of Child Labour in the Indian Granite Industry in India (Mines and Processing Units).”
At the press conference, held on 13 June...

An injury and then motherhood kept Sania Mirza away from tennis for three years. Now, she’s back