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India Today
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- India Today
Mapping conflict and its ‘flawed' characters
On the surface, Siddharthya Roy's The Company of Violent Men: Dispatches from the Bloody Fault Lines of the Subcontinent chronicles a series of essays based on his investigative reporting between 2016 and 2023 across Bangladesh, Germany and India. They are vignettes compiled from 'reported notes that didn't make it to the final edits'.These 'unfiltered dispatches' attempt to 'un-trope' the characters they feature—militants, refugees, clandestine agents, insurgents, reporters, wheeler-dealers and so on, whose lives have been flattened into familiar tropes of 'good and evil' and 'us and them' by the news book succeeds spectacularly well in this regard. Roy is so good at narrating what historian Hannah Arendt called the 'banality of evil' that what might, in another iteration, feel like atrocity tourism becomes instead an edifying the same time, the book is supposed to be a 'bit like a memoir'. We learn that Roy grew up affluent, was a Communist during his youth, likes Rage Against the Machine, and had a job as a programmer in a former life. At some point, he gave up on this conventional life and moved into investigative journalism. Because of his 'late' entry into journalism, Roy was advised by some editors to credential upward by getting a 'very expensive stamped paper' from the Columbia Journalism School, which he does, earning not just a degree but also a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. But piecing together this narrative of Roy's adult life is somewhat hard to do because the references are stochastic and intersect with the vignettes in oblique ways. So, yes, it is a 'bit like a memoir'.What is most impressive about the book, however, is that it is a primal scream, expressed in written words, against a world in which we are asked to live between right and wrong, and with both, and given no sense of what we are supposed to do with the anger we feel as a result of this. Anger against, among other things, state brutality (India, Bangladesh, the US's Global War on Terror); higher education (Columbia advisers obsessed with newsworthiness); journalists (who don't give credit to those who do the legwork, who glorify the 'untouched beauty of the forest' in which people die because of the lack of infrastructure, the German press nonchalantly buying stories from journalists from the Global South and running them with bylines of German journalists); the moral absolutists who have no regard for human rights, autonomy or dignity (religious fundamentalists of all stripes, Dalits, the Rohingya Salvation Army, Maoists, Kashmiri militants, the Tamil Tigers); and the power brokers, con artists, conspiracy theorists and 'middlemen' who profit from a global violence-industrial to India Today Magazine- Ends
The Wire
03-05-2025
- Politics
- The Wire
Two Years of Violence: Manipur's Future is Still Uncertain
This video story, part of the series ' Democracy's Blind Spot: Manipur Burns While India Looks Away ', is produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Two years have passed since violence erupted in Manipur, and despite having two governments of the same party in power – one at the centre and one in the state – peace remains elusive. Over this time, thousands have been displaced, hundreds have died, and countless families continue to suffer loss and uncertainty. Homes and villages lie in ruins, and the pain of losing loved ones still haunts many. The Wire travelled to Manipur to understand what has changed on the ground – if anything at all. In this report, journalist Yaqut Ali brings you voices from both sides of the conflict and a firsthand look at a region still grappling with fire, silence, and an uncertain future.
