Essays
Ride Across the River. This essay won the 2005 Outlook-Picador Nonfiction prize, India’s best known award for nonfiction writing.
I had entered the Outlook-Picador competition three times before.
In my first attempt, in 2001, my essay At Home With the Bodies was one of five entries shortlisted for the three prizes, though it didn’t win any.
The next year, my essay Kashmir Here, Kashmir There was runner-up.
I’ve always been intrigued by patriotism. In 2004-05, I held a WISCOMP Scholar of Peace Fellowship to do some writing on the subject, and eventually wrote 13 essays that were published in various places. In late 2005, WISCOMP published my essays in a monograph (“New Glory: Peace as Patriotism”).
Here are a few of those essays.
Tale of Terror and Tension (I called it “Still Warm”), published in The Hindu. I have a college buddy who now spends half his time in the Army. I wrote this essay after he told me about the first man he killed.
My Name’s not There, published in The Hindu. This essay is about a memorial to fallen soldiers in a remote part of J&K.
