Rohini Mohan's Blog

Chennai, the unique, wonderous city that introduced me to journalism, freedom and politics, has been flooded for weeks. It has had the highest rainfall in a 100 years, perhaps a sign of climate change, but the chaos is purely due to short-sighted urban development. The airport over a river bank, entire residential colonies over lakes, an IT hub over marshlands. But this stock-taking and

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I usually skim reviews of my book, leaping across the paragraphs that describe the plot, my eyes now trained to scan for knowledgeable comment and of course, praise. It is as much an exercise in vanity as it is in humility. "Hey! Another reviewer likes my book!" but "Oh hey, they haven't gone into its soul, perhaps it is just like every other book they've liked." Maybe it's greed, maybe it's a

Yesterday, I had a long phone conversation with the man who is really behind the #SelfieWithDaughter, which many have been attributing to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leaving it open for heightened praise and criticism. The real architect of the campaign is Sunil Jaglan - he is 33, a panchayat head of Bibipur village in Haryana, and he does not believe it will alone solve gender imbalance. It

A short trip to Chhattisgarh in February meant many things. A return to the kind of reporting I yearn for. The pleasure of seeing activists of the soil work - people who grew up in the small town they now work in don't think twice about barging into the collector's office to get some attention to an issue, because the latter was a school junior, or used to write love letters to his sister. But

Here are two extracts published online:
https://medium.com/@HarperCollinsIN/t...

https://www.guernicamag.com/features/...

And the first interview I did after the book was published!
https://www.guernicamag.com/daily/adi...

Unveiling.... the India cover of my book, from HarperCollins:

The past year was a whirlwind of words and places. The previous four were spent in the trance of reporting. For five years, I have been working on my book - it is my first, but feels like the only, ever. I have maintained a guarded silence about it, afraid it would go away, disappear, or exhaust itself if I spoke about it. But those I interviewed, people I consulted, and a handful of friends

Some days, the red of the earth and the piercing arrow of sunlight can turn the mind in directions it felt afraid to run in, imprisoned as it was by doors and clocks and pressure cooker whistles. Here, the questions float in and out, the answers refuse to come, but what joy there is in sinking into the cool fluid bed of not knowing. It is the absence of person that is the magic. To think all it

To leave Bangalore and its gentle high-altitude love, and to
be in a mega city that screamed CAPITAL and many other obscenities at me, was to feel
reclusive in a way I never thought possible.



And then, to cut the long story short, I found Holi. On one sunny terrace
in 2009, with friends I did not yet love, with strangers that wielded grabby
hands, with the bright orange of genda phool and