Editorial: Reviews – ULR Issue 14, Witness

Greetings! Dear Readers,

Wishing you all a very Happy New Year 2026. May this year bring you good health, enriching travels, authentic connections, and fulfilling food. Our theme for this issue was ‘Witness’.

I suppose the theme, Witness, prompted our submitters to formulate, analyse, close-read, and wonder about the act of witnessing in various paradigms, and contexts.

While Gaza is witnessing a fragile ceasefire, conditions there are far from ‘normal’. Kolkata-based reviewer, translator, and poet, Madhu Sriwastav draws attention to Vanished: The Mysterious Disappearance of Mustafa Ouda, which takes us to the heart of Gaza, and tells a disconcerting tale of what all a son witnesses, while searching for his father. The book is a thriller wrapped in a roller-coaster of emotions. Read the review here.

Noted Delhi-based columnist Ismail Salahuddin reviews Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, a book which places us, the readers, in uneasy positions where we witness the implications of where we are, and where we are headed. Read the review here.

Delhi-based writer and researcher Haider Ali and educator Ayushayman Mishra write insightfully about Gautam Bhatia’s recent book, The Indian Constitution: A Conversation with Power, and highlight Bhatia’s trenchant critique of the structural and functional decay of India’s parliamentary democracy. Read the essay here.

In conversation with Bhatia’s book, Phd Scholar Anagha Gopal reviews The People of India: A Remarkable History in 9 Chapters, which presents an unusual take, not only on India’s history, but rather, on how such an history can be narrated. Read the essay here.

If these latter three books are preoccupied with macro-topics like nation and macro-history, then Award-winning independent journalist Anasuya Basu’s review of Jerry Pinto’s A Good Life is surely to turn our gaze inwards, towards the family. Basu foregrounds the focus of Pinto’s book, palliative care, and how the author has dealt with the subject in a nuanced manner, through meticulous research and insightful interviews. Pinto, of the Em and the Big Hoom fame, is no stranger to how medical challenges can strain families and give rise to new subjectivities, and frameworks of support. He brings his perceptive understanding to the book, and it is as informative as it is touching. Read the essay here.

Our last essay is our way of keeping alive conversations around great books and great authors. So we have writer and editor at Locavore, Oishika Roy revisit Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, and uncover how Ferrante expertly interprets witnessing—observing, imagining, becoming—through her child- and adolescent- protagonists as they grapple with poverty stricken post-war Naples. It’s a dazzling essay on a timeless book. Read the essay here.

I profusely, abundantly, sweetly thank all our submitters, and our readers, for returning to us, over and over.

Happy reading, and Happy New Year,
Ankush Banerjee