Bhavya Dore

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

How a diehard fan of Roger Federer gets pulled in by the magic of Djokovic’s hometown.
Murals of Djokovic (top left) are a popular feature across Belgrade, as are tennis courts, which can even be found tucked inside the Belgrade Fortress (bottom left); The sun sets on The Victor (top right), an iconic Serbian monument dating back to the Balkan Wars; In the warmer months outdoor dining (bottom right) takes over the city. Photos By: ToskanaINC/Shutterstock (mural); Dreamer Company/Shutterstock ...

Earlier this year, Dijana Djokovic watched her son Novak win his 16th grand slam title at Wimbledon, defeating Roger Federer in a five-set almost-five hour thriller.
Novak, considered among the greatest of all time, regained the world number one ranking last year. But it wasn’t always easy for Dijana and her family, especially in the early years. Now, along with her husband, she runs the restaurant Novak in Belgrade where she spoke to GQ about THAT Wimbledon final, her favourite moments in No...

WIRED
Kate Gilligan was four years old when she tried on a dress for the first time. She was at a friend’s home when she saw a laundry basket full of dresses. Later that year, when her mother was doing dishes, Kate put her hands on the sink and asked: “Mommy, can I be a girl?” No, her mother said. That night, Kate, who was assigned male at birth, went to bed praying she would wake up a girl.
“To remember something from that long ago so vividly means it must have been important,” says Gilligan...

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Reportage
Sexual assault is a despicable crime but few care when the victim is an animal.
On the muggy night of October 13, 2017, Ajit Dev* and his wife sat on the balcony of their one-room...

Police in India's commercial capital face accusations of using an old law against begging as a way to pick up anyone sleeping on the streets so they can reach their arrest quotas.
MUMBAI — Mahesh Kavade does not have a home. But as an informal labourer, he takes construction site jobs working on other people’s. One May morning, he was asleep on a bench on platform 1 at Kurla railway station, when he was abruptly roused and hauled into a police van, he claims. He had little on him besides his ...

Reportage
The pleasure and pain of being a jockey
When P. S. Chouhan woke up and checked his weight on Saturday morning, the scale said 54 kg, two more than he could be if he wanted to ride Glorious Days, his first horse on July 6, the fifteenth day of Bengaluru’s summer racing season.
Every horse is assigned a weight it can carry, depending on age, form, and the nature of the race, which means a jockey is often focused not just on shaving seconds while racing but also grams before a race. Ch...

Kolhapuris, the sturdy leather chappal that rose from its humble rural origins to occupy the high table of fashion globally, now has a Geographical Indication (GI) tag.

The Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks has granted the GI tag for Kolhapuris to a large area in Maharashtra and Karnataka, covering four districts in each state.

What the GI tag means is that footwear produced only in these eight districts will qualify to carry the tag of being Kolhapuris.

Producers of foot...

Rajubhai Kanubhai Baraiya settles into a dark blue leather chair at his furniture store in Alang town on India’s western coast. It’s almost lunchtime on a 40-degree day—104 in Fahrenheit—and the air is thick with heat. There are barely any cars or people on the road that leads to the water’s edge, where past a security checkpost lies the world’s largest shipbreaking yard.
Surrounded by wooden doors, soft sofas, and tall stools, Baraiya points to some of his wares. “That,” he says, gesturing a...

A journalist who went public with her rape allegation is changing the rules in a country where male privilege dominates culture and consent is a blurred line.
Seoul — Shiori Ito switches on the hotel television five minutes before 6pm. Sitting cross-legged on the double bed patted down with white covers, she briskly flips through the channels in search for one which will air the Nobel Peace Prize announcement.
Ito, 29, has heard a rumour the peace prize might go to the #MeToo movement to reco...

Panchayat members in Ghatmeeka village on the Rajasthan-Haryana border discuss the changes to dairy farming in the region following the recent spate of lynchings. Cow protection laws and cow vigilantism have also magnified the problem of unproductive cattle.
Alwar, Nuh, Bharatpur, Tonk, Bhilwara, Rajsamand, Jaipur: In Ghatmeeka village on the Haryana-Rajasthan border, a gathering of panchayat elders mulled over some changes in recent years.
When people want to buy cows, they no longer go the ...

Alwar, Banswara, Jaipur, Nuh, Pratapgarh, Rajsamand, Tonk: In September 2018, Irshad Khan was on his way to the district court in Behror in Alwar district, when masked men in a car without a number-plate approached his vehicle and fired in the air. Irshad was on his way to testify in the murder trial of his father, Pehlu Khan, who had been attacked in April 2017 by a group of cow vigilantes while transporting cows from a cattle fair in Jaipur.
Irshad never reached court that day. “They wanted...