Do we really need a caste census? ft Anand Teltumbde and Yogendra Yadav
Few policy ideas in India have generated as much political heat as the caste census. From television studios to opinion pages, the argument...
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Society & Culture
The Sandip Roy Show
What makes people tick? What are the stories they carry with them? In a world of shouting heads, veteran journalist, radio commentator and novelist Sandip Roy sits down to have real conversa...
Episodes
20 of 195 episodes
Anuradha Roy on leaving city life for the mountains
The mountains are often imagined as an escape from city life. A place to visit, slow down, and leave behind. But for writer Anuradha Roy, th...
How colonialism shoved India's queer history into the closet ft Sindhu Rajasekaran
June is Pride Month around the world but does India need to march to that calendar? More Indian cities now hold Pride in winter, when it’s c...
Indulge: Is fine dining in India going small? ft Gauri Devidayal, Yash Bhanage and Shuli Ghosh
Fine dining in India has shifted dramatically. What once meant dressing up for a five-star hotel is now shaped by standalone restaurants tha...
Rakshit Sonawane on the rarely told urban Dalit story
When people from upper castes talk about caste, it’s often through headlines — about atrocities or reservations — stories reduced to data, d...
The history of rubber we would rather erase ft Vidya Rajan
Even though many of us in India immediately think of an eraser when we hear the word rubber, the material has long become an inseparable par...
Is the Hindi heartland becoming India’s Hindu heartland? ft Ghazala Wahab
Every election season, attention turns to India’s Hindi heartland, a region central to the country’s politics and identity. It has produced...
Indulge: Is India the next cheese frontier? ft Namrata Sundaresan and Mansi Jasani
When we think of cheese, names like Brie, Gouda, or Cheddar usually come to mind — but nothing much from India. Yet India, home to the world...
Kunzang Choden on Bhutan beyond the tourist trail
Many of us grew up with only a patchy knowledge of Bhutan. And these days, most stories about the country in India tend to focus on tourism....
Why India needs to take sleep seriously ft Dr GC Khilnani
In this episode, host Sandip Roy discusses India’s national sleep crisis, a problem that affects all ages, from anxious teenagers to overwor...
The underbelly of the gig economy ft Vandana Vasudevan
In recent years, online retail has transformed how we shop—bringing everything from food to taxis to our doorstep. The convenience is undeni...
How we love the mango but know very little about it ft Sopan Joshi
Summer in India brings with it the irresistible charm of mangoes, and the predictable flood of mango themed stories. These usually blend nos...
Lal Bahadur Shastri, India's forgotten PM ft Sanjeev Chopra
Long relegated to the footnotes of history, Lal Bahadur Shastri is often overshadowed by the towering legacies of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indir...
How Indians in America took on Indira Gandhi’s Emergency ft Prof Anand Kumar and Sugata Srinivasaraju
On June 25, 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of Emergency in India—an era marked by censorship, arrests, and a suspension...
Ruchir Joshi on the Calcutta you don’t know
In this episode, host Sandip Roy Show is joined by author Ruchir Joshi who takes us back to Calcutta in the early 1940s, an era charged with...
Pride Month Special: How has gayness evolved in popular culture?
To what extent has gay representation in Indian popular culture evolved? Is it now simply trendy to include gay characters, or are these por...
Forget Hindi or English, what about the other 777 languages? ft Ganesh Devy and Anvita Abbi
India recently saw heated debates around the three-language formula — a policy suggesting students learn a modern Indian language like Hindi...
The Mystery of the Awadh 'Royals' of Delhi's Malcha Mahal ft Aletta André and Abhimanyu Kumar
In 1975, Begum Wilayat Mahal and her children, Princess Sakina and Prince Ali Raza, moved into New Delhi Railway Station, claiming to be des...
The Urdu newspaper that dared to speak truth to power ft Chander Mohan and Jyotsna Mohan
Long before press freedom indexes were even conceived, the Urdu newspaper Pratap was speaking truth to power in undivided India — and paying...
Manu Pillai on how Hinduism and Christianity transformed each other
In this episode, we discuss how early Christian missionaries encountered Hinduism during colonial rule depending on where they landed and wh...