The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  The Hand on the Shoulder Oct 19, 2026  During the arati, when the dhak gets loud enough to move the floor under the folding chairs, a boy of about six broke away from his mother and ran the length of the hall with his arms out, weaving between the rows, laughing at nothing in particular. An uncle caught him by the shoulder, turned him around and bent to his ear with his face arranged into that expression the diaspora keeps ready for its children, the one that means you are embarrassing us. The boy's arms came down. He walked back and sat. The dhak carried on, the smoke carried on, the queue for bhog carried on, and nobody in that hall thought anything had happened. Something had. The most important thing that happened in the pandal that evening was the hand on that shoulder, and every adult in the room missed it because we were all busy watching the idol. The hall had taken two months to put together. The booking, the sponsorship banners along the side wall, the WhatsA...

  The Whiteness of So-Called Progressivism Oct 11, 2026  Progressive Foreign Policy and the 2026 Election, hosted by Te Kuaka and the New Zealand Fabian Society, Auckland, October 2026. The panel: Teanau Tuiono (Green Party), Vanushi Walters (Labour), Daniel Eb (The Opportunities Party). Source: NZ Fabian Society recording. On a Friday evening in October 2026, four candidates from the parties of the progressive opposition spent three hours in Auckland building a principled foreign policy for Aotearoa. India is never mentioned. Neither is Hindutva, Modi, the BJP, the RSS, caste, Kashmir, Indian Muslims, Islamophobia, nor the free trade agreement with India that came into force eleven days later. That same week Indian police were detaining protesters in their thousands, cutting mobile internet in central Delhi, sealing Jantar Mantar and hauling in opposition chief ministers and journalists, against a youth movement demanding the resignation of a Chief Election Commission...

  The Names They Struck Off India is deleting its citizens from democracy, and Aotearoa has just signed on as a partner Oct 10, 2026  Nabijan Mondal had voted in every Indian election for half a century when, in April 2026, she went looking for her name on the revised electoral roll of West Bengal and found that it was gone. Her husband was still on the roll for the village of Gobindapur in North 24 Parganas, and so were her three sons, her daughter and their spouses, which meant that the only name the state had removed from the household was hers. For decades she had been Nabijan on her voter card and Nabirul on her Aadhaar card and her ration card, a difference no official had cared about through fifty years of polling days, until a system built to hunt for mismatches between old and new records decided that the difference made her a doubtful citizen. She told Al Jazeera that she had not understood much of what was happening to her and had never imagined that carrying...