Bongani Madondo is a South African writer who, for the better part of his life, has been tip-toeing around words in search of the perfect phrase. His family, originally from the Kwa-Zulu Natal province of South Africa, migrated further north where they settled in an area called Hammanskraal on the outskirts of Pretoria. It’s this grounding which, in part, contributed to the writer he became. 

On Tuesday, September 1, the rains came. By the next day, much of the city of Srinagar in the Indian-controlled region of Jammu and Kashmir was already under water. The water levels of the major rivers—the Chenab and Jhelum— continued to rise, steadily licking the stone walls and banks that tenuously separate the rivers from people. In one particularly tragic incident, at least thirteen members of a single family were killed after landslides hit a house in Thanamandi, in the region of Jammu.

Asim Rafiqui on art institutions and their collusion with the politics of imperialism.