Newslaundry Interviews

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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 interview with the Beatles and a lot more.

To watch the full unedited interview, subscribe to newslaundry.com.

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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 about their experience in prison, state repression, and Pinjra Tod’s participation in the citizenship law protests.

“Through this regime over the last four to five years, we have been seeing an increasing repression by this government through the use of various laws, whether it is sedition or UAPA,” Devangana says. “It was quite shocking to be booked under a stringent law like the UAPA which is an attack on the student community and its rising voices, and equally an attack on the Muslim community.”

Natasha says, “One of the things we have learnt through our journey at Pinjra Tod is women’s freedom cannot be achieved in isolation. This struggle for freedom is not in isolation from other struggles.” She describes the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens as an attempt by the government to “change the nature of this country, the nature of this state, the nature of the constitution itself”.

They also talk about the sense of community among people in similar circumstances to their own.

Listen.

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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 independence,” he says, “nothing has been thrown open though it is against the archival rules which suggest that these records should be made available after 25 years.”

But in 2014, he says, “a very big collection of Nehru papers, earlier in private hands, became available and was passed on to official hands, and I was able to get permission to check those papers. And it was a treasure trove.”

He also talks about the McMahon line, drawn by the British to separate India and China, and says China was not consulted on it and, therefore, never accepted it.

Listen.

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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 digital arm of Roli Books, in partnership with Newslaundry. 

Kobad, Ishaat Hussain and Gautam Vohra, who were together in Doon School’s class of 1963, talk about their childhood and friendship. They also talk about the evolution of Kobad, who has dedicated his life working for the marginalised and spent a decade in various prisons. The discussion is moderated by Abhinandan Sekhri of Newslaundry.

“I have been to six or seven prisons and the way cases were opening up initially, one after the other, I felt I wouldn’t even get out,” says Kobad. “But I was in general writing in prison for the mainstream, for anything that disturbed me.”

Ishaat believes that whatever Kobad has done was right and "very few of us can really turn around and say and do that with any great conviction".

Narrating the journey of the dramatic years when he was in contact with Kobad, Gautam says, "If I could de-class myself and live with the poor, something I feel I had the guts for, that was something I could sense was not in me but was in Kobad.”

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.