by Abhishek Shah | Sep 21, 2020 | Narratives & Features, Portfolio
One of the world’s most popular police departments on Twitter and Facebook is in Bangalore, India. And it’s all because they took the risk of partnering up with a hip outside consultant. Last September, when riots broke out in Bangalore city, the best...
by Abhishek Shah | Sep 21, 2020 | Narratives & Features, Portfolio
India has made a significant change to its laws about rape. The Supreme Court has ruled that if a husband has sex with his wife and she is under 18, he is committing an act of rape. Up until now rape was illegal, but there was one glaring exception. A wife could not...
by Abhishek Shah | Sep 21, 2020 | Narratives & Features, Portfolio
Water stagnating at a construction site. A dwindling number of mangroves along the shore. Lakes choked with algae and hyacinth. Sewage pipes leaking into the sea. These are common sights in India. Until recently, the best people could do to try to draw attention to...
by Abhishek Shah | Sep 21, 2020 | Narratives & Features, Portfolio
#fakenews isn’t just a U.S. thing. And it isn’t just about politics. In India people are putting their health at risk by following spurious advice dispensed on forwards on Whatsapp, the phone-based messaging app. Here’s one popular hoax making the...
by Abhishek Shah | Sep 21, 2020 | Narratives & Features, Portfolio
The study has a depressing name: The Million Death Study. But its latest set of data, published in the journal The Lancet on Wednesday, is anything but depressing when it comes to the topic of childhood deaths in India. India has the tragic distinction of...
by Abhishek Shah | Sep 21, 2020 | Narratives & Features, Portfolio
Mumbai has 72 miles of coastline, some of it covered in mangroves and some of it sandy or rocky — but none of it is clean. There isn’t a beach culture here. It’s not a place for gathering and tanning — more often it’s a...
by Abhishek Shah | Sep 21, 2020 | Essays & Commentaries, Portfolio
For the second year in a row, India has landed the dubious distinction of being number one in the world for deaths from tuberculosis: 423,000 TB patients died in the year 2016. That’s a third of the world’s 1.4 million death toll. India, of course, is not...
by Abhishek Shah | Sep 21, 2020 | Essays & Commentaries, Portfolio
For five mornings each week, the elderly women who visit the Rangoli Women’s Center say they feel like they belong somewhere. This is an unusual feeling for many of them. In most of India, older women are practically invisible. In large families, they take on...
by Abhishek Shah | Sep 21, 2020 | Narratives & Features, Portfolio
For two years, every weekend a group of volunteers converges on Versova beach, on the north shore of Mumbai, to collect the rubbish – by hand! The team has already collected over 7000 tonnes of waste – and it all started with one man. A lawyer who looked...
by Abhishek Shah | Sep 21, 2020 | Narratives & Features, Portfolio
India has a coastline of more than 7,000 kilometers, but sadly, it’s not all pristine beaches and stunning cliffs. In fact, for Mumbai’s citizens, the shore is more like a landfill. The beaches are covered with trash — colourful plastic bags, bottles...