Editors’ Picks – February & March 2026

Last month, in the pacy week leading to our women’s day special, we truly missed the chance to share with our readers something we look forward to each month — every month-end, our team brings you art, writing, or more that inspired us, adorned us with perspective amidst the unflinching news cycles our lives wheel through. So we are bringing two picks this month - writings that anchored us, separately, collectively.

I have been thinking a lot about wars – wars between countries and wars within them. There are wars the Indian state has waged against many of its own people – I saw a video, hazy, transfixed like a CCTV footage of Sharjeel Imam walking back into the Tihar jail yesterday after attending a family event on interim bail. In that imagery, it was evident that he may be imprisoned, but he has not been erased – and in wars that countries wage against their own, it is public memory that holds together this pushback against repression. 

This week, I also saw Kasim Khan, the son of Pakistan’s, arguably, most iconic figure Imran Khan, deposing before the UNHRC about his father’s uncertain fate – jailed, by Pakistan’s military regime, in solitary confinement since a 1000 days, in squalor, amidst insect infestation. The Pakistani state has done everything it could – censorship, policing, even ensuring Khan’s name is not mentioned on broadcast – and yet, he lives in public thought. And that leads me to my pick, journalist Osman Samiuddin’s fantastic profile, from January, in Equator, of Pakistan’s ex-prime minister, whose memory and cultural influence refuses to die. 

“Just so we’re clear, the following is a fact. Not opinion, not a point of view, not a hot take. Fact. There is no Pakistani – male, female, dead, alive, real, imagined – as famous as Imran Khan,” Samiuddin writes, for instance, about how shortly after Imran was assigned prison number 804, people literally rushed to register car license plates numbered ‘804’. It is as much the profile of a political prisoner as it is a cultural commentary on our neighbouring country – but it is also about how deeply a people choose to remember, against all odds and repressions. Memories, whether of Imran, on the other side, or Sharjeel, closer home, by themselves embody that resistance.

Sushovan Patnaik,
Associate Editor