Speakers
India has a brilliant constitution with nuanced laws on preventive detention, manual scavenging, military justice, free speech. Reality, as we well know, isn’t always so perfectly packaged.
Discovery of New India (Conditions Apply) is a graphic novel by Aakar Patel and political cartoonist PenPencilDraw that moves through courtrooms, prisons, police stations, and the quiet machinery of bureaucracy to show how rights in contemporary India often exist with conditions attached. What makes it unusual is its form: stark, unsparing illustration that makes legal and constitutional realities, the kind that would otherwise stay buried in fine print, feel visceral and immediate. This is reportage you can’t look away from.
Aakar Patel joins journalist Priya Ramani for a conversation about how the book was made: the rigorous research, the visual language it demanded, and the particular courage it takes to illustrate how power actually behaves. The session then opens to audience questions.
Speakers
Aakar Patel
Aakar Patel, Chair of Amnesty International India, is a syndicated columnist who has edited English and Gujarati newspapers. His books include Why I Write, a translation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s Urdu non-fiction (Tranquebar, 2014), Our Hindu Rashtra: What It Is. How We Got Here, a study of majoritarianism in India and Pakistan (Westland, 2020), Price of the Modi Years, a history of India after 2014 (Penguin Random House, 2021), The Anarchist Cookbook, a guide on why and how to protest (HarperCollins, 2022) and the novel After Messiah (Vintage, 2023).
Priya Ramani
Priya Ramani is a Bangalore-based journalist. She is the co-founder of the award-winning India Love Project and on the editorial board of news website Article 14. She is a columnist for The Hindu Sunday Magazine and Quint.
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