Equator's Samanth Subramanian and the journalist Osman Samiuddin dive into one of world sport's most charged rivalries - India versus Pakistan in cricket - and explore the "geopolitical hot mess" that is cricket in South Asia today.

Osman, a senior editor at ESPNCricinfo and the author of The Unquiet Ones, a history of cricket in Pakistan, recently wrote The Hidden Imran for Equator, about the Pakistani government's attempt to erase the country's most famous man from public view. But even beyond the imprisonment and effacement of Imran Khan, cricket in the subcontinent has long been shaped by political tension, conflict and fragile diplomacy.

Osman and Samanth discuss how cricket matches have doubled as proxy battlegrounds, how players carry the weight of national identity, and how the line between sport and statecraft has all but disappeared. The India-Pakistan rivalry, in particular, escalated around the recent World Cup, to the point that it appears as if cricket and politics in these nations can never be separated. Finally, Osman narrates the story of one of cricket's most iconic figures: Imran Khan, revered as Pakistan's World Cup-winning captain and then as politician and prime minister. Osman explains how Imran was jailed on corruption charges, many of them spurious, and how, as the government has tried to mask Imran and his legacy, the internet has played a crucial role in keeping his story alive.

Read The Hidden Imran on Equator.

In March, the Lebanese writer Lina Mounzer's family home in Beirut was bombed as part of the US-Israeli war on Iran and its neighbours. In an earlier time, Lina might have written about the destruction of her home and of Beirut for a New York magazine or newspaper. But as she tells  Equator's Pankaj Mishra, she has stopped trying to explain the Middle East to Americans.

In this episode, Pankaj asks Lina about The Disaster Correspondent, her memoir-essay about writing for mainstream magazines and newspapers in the US. She recalls the problems of being pigeonholed as a writer and having her work minimised when she was classified by certain print outlets as a disaster correspondent. Pankaj and Lina discuss the complex balance of wanting to raise awareness of the extreme and destabilising events in her home country with the exhausting and predictable way her pieces would be stripped of nuance, severely limiting her identity as a writer.

Read The Disaster Correspondent on Equator. Also read Lina's short essay "My Home is Burning", about the bombing of her family home.

Equator’s Nesrine Malik invites the historian Nikhil Pal Singh to unpack Homeland Empire, his essay for the magazine about how the US’ imperialist tendencies overseas are inextricably bound up with its violence at home. Nikhil argues that the current Trump administration is reworking both foreign and domestic policy to create a single domain of impunity that exceeds American borders. 

Nesrine and Nikhil discuss how the recent actions of ICE and the US’ wars overseas are missions with the same end goal. Exploring the similarities of these strategies, Nesrine and Nikhil believe, leaves us better-placed to grasp what is happening – and what political structures are needed to oppose them. Through his vast understanding of the US’ history of race and immigration, Nikhil also describes how the Trump administration has taken advantage of the country’s existing legal structures to carry out his plan, and how these structures were established by both Democratic and Republican governments.

Read Homeland Empire on Equator. To learn more, visit equator.org.

Welcome to the Equator podcast, hosted by the writers Mohsin Hamid, Nesrine Malik and Pankaj Mishra.

Equator is a digital and print magazine launched by a global group of writers after a consensus that our media landscape today has been tarnished by censorship, complicity and an inability to stand up for the values of justice, solidarity and compassion. No longer should the future of the world be determined through the lens of the West. Now is the time to create something new.

The mission of Equator is to hold up a mirror to a worldwide audience of readers and writers who don’t yet recognise themselves as belonging together. All of us have had intimations of our overlapping identities and affinities, our participation in a shared global history, even while separated by narrow nationalisms and parochial press cultures. For us, the widely proclaimed “end of the West” is not the end of the world; the epoch ahead is ripe with the promise of fresh illuminations, of new horizons of human action and imagination.

Equator is a movement as much as a magazine. We will publish unique longform stories about politics, culture, literature and art – but our work will also encompass public events, reading groups, screenings and exhibitions. Become a member today!