Newslaundry Interviews

In episode 2, Kunal and economist Montek Singh Ahluwalia explore how India achieved liberalisation in 1991 – the economic crisis and what caused it, and what led India to open up to the world. On the nature of India’s economy at the time, Montek says, “India had locked itself in a highly restricted situation.” They also discuss public investment in industries, income inequality, and how private in...

Welcome to Back In Time , our brand new show hosted by Kunal Kamra. Kunal sits down with writers, filmmakers, journalists, lawyers and economists to, well, go back in time and discuss critical moments in independent India’s history.  In episode 1, Kunal revisits 1990s India with documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan. Anand takes us back to his time shooting Ram Ke Naam , which explored the s...

At Newslaundry , we always strive to produce in-depth stories. And thanks to your contributions to our NL Sena projects, we’re able to do just that. Most recently, we published a series of reports as part of two Sena projects – The Yogi Who Has It All and Bulldozing a New Imagine in MP .  The first is a look at Ramdev’s journey from a schoolboy in a small Haryana village to a yoga guru helmin...

Last November, in an interview with Newslaundry , data scientist and former Facebook employee Sophie Zhang described the social media company’s reluctance to act against fake accounts in India.  Now, in this interview with Chitranshu Tewari, Sophie explains how she had offered to testify before India’s parliamentary standing committee on information, and why she shared documentation on her wo...

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In this episode of NL Recess, film critic and founder of Film Companion, Anupama Chopra, speaks to Manisha Pande about her journey from the world of print and TV into the digital landscape, consequences of vicious demonisation of Bollywood on mainstream television news and the reflection of jingoistic nationalism in Hindi cinema.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What does it take to cover assembly elections on the ground? On March 9, the team that covered the polls – in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa and Punjab – interacted with subscribers on Newslaundry’s Discord server to talk about how they searched for reports and gauged the pulse of the electorate. They took subscribers through their experiences of meeting voters with various political ideologies,...

On a bright Sunday morning, Atul, Manisha and Meghnad sit with journalist #FrederichNoronah to discuss the newspapers of the day. We look at the issue of unemployment in #Goa . Frederich tells us about the injection of communal politics in Goa, the uniqueness of the #Konkani language, the issue of conversion, concerns of the Goan #Catholic community and why this will be a very confusing election....

January 29, 2022. This morning, the headlines bring the grim news that there have been 20 Covid deaths in Goa within a day﹘many of those who succumbed to the virus were unvaccinated. Meanwhile, the Congress has issued an ad that makes lack of high-speed internet in Goa an election issue. We also tell you all about Goa’s couple candidates. If all 10 of them win, 25 percent of the Assembly will be...

January 28, 2022 Welcome to the second episode of the Morning Show, where we take you through the major newspaper headlines as Atul, Manisha and Meghnad travel to states set for the 2022 Assembly elections. In this episode, we have Gomantak group editor Raju Naik on board. He tells us about the mediascape in Goa and how a political party may be offering bribes to editors. Naik explains that most G...

January 27, 2020 We have a new show up! Atul, Manisha and Meghnad are on the election trail and will be traveling through Goa, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Punjab. Today, they are in Panjim and take you through the newspapers in the Morning Show. Which political party has the most ads? What's making headlines in the front pages? Who are political cartoons taking potshots at? Watch the video here...

Last week, former bishop Franco Mulakkal, accused of raping a nun in Kottayam 13 times, was acquitted by the Kottayam district court. The nun had alleged that despite her repeated complaints, the Catholic Church had ignored her. Five other nuns who spoke out in support of her faced retaliation from the church. Sandhya Raju George is a lawyer who was on the panel of advocates representing the nuns...

In a year marked by protests and the pandemic, two Newslaundry correspondents – Nidhi Suresh and Basant Kumar – navigate our biggest stories of 2021, and what they learned in the process. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of NL Recess, writer and host of the podcast  The Seen and the Unseen  Amit Varma joins Chitranshu Tewari to talk about evolving media cultures and patterns in the digital space, the binaries of “bhakts” and “wokes”, and the difficult bracketing of Indian conservatism. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Vanita Kohli-Khandekar is a journalist and author, whose book The Indian Media Business: Pandemic and After was released in October this year.  In this interview with Chitranshu Tewari, Vanita explains the relationship between how broadcast media makes media and what the audience gets to see, the business economics of ad-funded media, and the lack of government foresight in seeing media as an...

Sophie Zhang is a former data scientist at Facebook, now Meta, who published a series of articles in the  Guardian  on the social media platform’s fake engagement accounts. She alleged these often lead to interference in political elections. In this interview with Chitranshu Tewari, Sophie describes the suspicious patterns of behaviour she observed in 2019 with respect to India. On the c...

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In this episode of NL Recess, actor Kabir Bedi joins Abhinandan Sekhri to discuss his autobiography  Stories I Must Tell: The Emotional Life of an Actor . Kabir opens up about his unconventional upbringing and his journey of finding true companionship. He talks about his experiences in cinema in different countries, about the time he persuaded the manager of All India Radio to land himself an...

In May last year, student activists Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita were arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in connection with the Delhi riots. One year later, on June 15, they were granted bail and released. Natasha and Devangana are both students at Jawaharlal Nehru University and members of Pinjra Tod, a women’s collective. In this interview with Nidhi Suresh, they talk...

Avtar Singh Bhasin is a writer and historian. In this interview with Newslaundry ’s Shardool Katyayan, he talks about his latest book Nehru, Tibet and China , which explores the backdrop of the 1962 Sino-Indian War and its aftermath.  Bhasin talks about the time and effort he spent researching the book, and how most government documents and records about the 1962 war are classified. “Since in...

Having different procurement channels and varying prices for vaccines threatens to undermine the inoculation programme. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why does Kobad Ghandy, one of India’s most prominent communist activists and ideologues, do what he does? Why does he keep landing in prison, again and again? What’s he fighting for? What keeps him going?  To discuss Kobad’s life through the prism of his book Fractured Freedom: A Prison Memoir , three schoolmates whose lives took dramatically varying paths were brought together by Roli Pulse,...

The Hindu Yuva Vahini is involved while a former VHP leader plans to do a ‘purification’ ceremony once the woman is found. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.