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Selected Writing

2024

​Orion, April 2024, Stall Economy

on constructed homelessness and state-neglect faced by India's street-food vendors

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2023

Longreads, June 2023, Meals for One
an essay on solitude, and cooking for one's self

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​The Baffler, March 2023, India's Beef with Beef

on vegetarianism, national-identity and caste-based surveillance in Modi's India

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Vittles, November 2023, Hospitality is not conditional 

on demanding racialised communities to perform service with a smile

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Orion, November 2023, Spring Has Left Us

on the loss of transitonal seasons and the language of desire

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The Audacity, September 2023, Warm Blood

an essay on anger and the masculine city selected by Roxane Gay

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2022

​FiftyTwo, December 2022, Dear Neighbour

A story about Indian fandom of Pakistani music and post-partition sentiment in India today

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​​​Vittles, December 2022, Introduction to Punjab: Food, Music, Resistance

an introduction to a series on food in music across divided Piunjab

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Vittles, May 2022, Indian Biscuits: A story of Indian Biscuits

a story about independent India through four biscuits

 

Whetstone, May 2022, Songs of Survival, The Opposite of Plenty

reportage on famine-foods, folklore and the cyclical nature of starvation in Rajasthan

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Hazlitt, March 2022, Bad Taste 

on selective outrage in global food-media

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2021

​The Believer, December  2021, An Interview with Artist Alana Hunt

a conversation with Alana about her book, Cups of Nun Chai

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Orion, September  2021, The Ghost Crop of Goa 

a reported essay on saline-resistant indigenous rice varieties in Goa, India

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Wasafiri, February 2021, Seamless (Winner, Wasafiri New Writing Prize)

an essay on navigating a body split at the seams, or the aftermath of sexual assault

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The Third Eye, November 2021, How Momo Aunties Changed Delhi

reportage on women momo-vendors in Delhi, and what makes a hospitable city

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​Vittles, June  2021, All too much: The Absurdity of the Tandoori Momo

an essay about Delhi and chaos as an ingridient in street-food

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2020

52, October 2020, Powder

a social history of custard powder and utilitarian cooking in India

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Atlas Obscura, September 2020, A Forgotten Holocaust Is Missing From Indian Food Stories (Nominated for the IACP award, 2021)

A story about the foods of the Bengal Famine of the 1940s, and the biases of culinary history

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The Baffler, December 2020, Harvest of Dissent

A dispatch from the historic farmers' protests in Punjab

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Vittles, August 2020, Whose food city?​ The Northeastern Restaurants of Humayunpur, Delhi

A dispatch from Humanyunpur, Delhi

 

Montez Press, August 2020, On Stillness a mediation on stillness and time during the pandemic

 

Mangal Media, October 2020, Delhi's kebabs: The Taste of Memory

an essay on kebabs in Delhi 

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Mangal Media, May 2020, The commodification of  South-Asian identity politics â€‹

on South-Asian representation in the Western diaspora

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2019

​​Longreads, March, 2019, Coming Home, One Word At A Time

an essay on learning to write Urdu and returning home to a polarised India

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Popula, January 2019, Me, today

dispatch from a traffic jam in Delhi

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​​​Eater, February 2019The World's Most Expensive Spice is on the Verge of Disappearing (Conde Nast Best Food Writing, 2019)

reportage on the challenges of growing saffron in militarised Kashmir

 

2018

Popula, November 2018, There is no Dalit cuisine (Longreads, Best of Food Writing, 2018)

A story about the dissonance in dominant-caste documentation of food in India

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2016

​Roads and Kingdoms,September 2016, Eating Beetles on a Shrinking Island

a story about unlikely climate warriors in Majuli, Assam, Northeast India​

 

Roads and Kingdoms, April 2016, The Bone-setters of Kanpur

a dispatch about traditional medicine practitioners in Kanpur, North India

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