Shoumojit Banerjee

Sadashivrao Bhau with Ibrahim Khan Gardi “We went forth to Paniput to battle with the Mlech, ere we came back from Paniput and left a kingdom there.” So runs Rudyard Kipling’s haunting verse on the Third Battle of Panipat, from his poem ‘With Scindia to Delhi.’  The devastating line - “and left a kingdom there” - has never lost its chill as we enter the 265th anniversary of that fateful battle. For Maharashtra, the Panipat catastrophe, where the forces of the Afghan invader Ahmad Shah...

Kaamya Karthikeyan’s skiing odyssey to the South Pole crowns a teenage career built on astonishing willpower and endurance. At 18, Kaamya Karthikeyan has become the youngest Indian and the second-youngest woman anywhere to ski to the South Pole. It is a feat that sounds deceptively neat in a newspaper headline which somehow fails to capture the gruelling reality of this stupendous achievement involving weeks of hauling a sled across the Antarctic nothingness, in temperatures that punish skin...

America’s seizure of Nicolás Maduro may please his victims but it tramples the law and revives the worst habits of oil imperialism. President Donald Trump’s decision to attack Venezuela, abduct its president and temporarily run the country marks a striking departure for a politician who once derided foreign adventurism and mocked his predecessors for mistaking regime change for strategy. Nicolás Maduro is no saint. He has presided over a devastated petrostate, has stolen elections, crushed...