Musheera Ashraf, Twocircles.net Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh: India’s digital story is often told through numbers. Millions of UPI transactions every minute. Seamless online services. Government schemes linked to apps. But far away from this vision, in villages where phones are shared and passwords are guessed, women continue to stand at the margins of a world that has shifted faster than they...

Sami Ahmad, TwoCircles.net In Bihar the long queues seen outside polling booths on November 6 and 11 were matched only by the lines that soon formed at railway stations. As soon as voting ended thousands of people rushed to catch trains the cheapest and most familiar route out of the state. These were not regular commuters. They were migrant workers...

Midhat Samra, TwoCircles Ranchi: Suman Devi watched me photograph the pink auto and said that people come here to click pictures because the bright colour fascinates them but few bother to understand the struggles of the women who drive them. The pink auto scheme was launched in Jharkhand in 2013 after the Nirbhaya case to address women’s safety concerns. It aimed to...

Shah Khursheed, TwoCircles.net Srinagar: Bareera, 24, a postgraduate student from Pulwama, remembers the first signs of something being wrong with unsettling clarity. In Class 11, while living in a girls’ hostel in Srinagar, her periods suddenly stopped. One month passed, then another. The silence of her body frightened her. She whispered her worry to her roommate, who tried to calm...

Sami Ahmad, TwoCircles.net Patna: Nitish Kumar, despite being a partner and facilitator of the BJP, still seeks Muslim votes in the upcoming Bihar Assembly election. His supporters argue that Nitish Kumar has managed to contain the BJP’s divisive policies, but many Muslims ask a pertinent question “Why did Nitish Kumar ditch us on the Waqf law?” referring to the Modi government’s...

By Sami Ahmad, TwoCircles.net Patna: As Bihar heads toward the 2025 Assembly elections, the Muslim community, which makes up 17.7 percent of the state’s population, stands at a political crossroads. With 243 seats in the Assembly and two competing alliances, the opposition Grand Alliance (Mahagathbandhan) and the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA), Muslims face a familiar dilemma: how to balance the...

Adeeba Jamal, TwoCircles.net Old Delhi’s narrow lanes have a life all their own. Every twist and turn carries a piece of history, some shining and some fading like old ink. In Ballimaran, there is Gali Qasim Jan, a name remembered even when its history is almost forgotten. It does not announce its past with plaques or polished boards. The air is...

Farheen Saifi, TwoCircles.net “Kitna hai bad-naseeb ‘Zafar’ dafn ke liye, Do gaz zameen bhi na mili kuu-e-yaar mein.” (How unfortunate is Zafar, even in death, he was denied a place to rest in his beloved land) New Delhi: The couplet written by last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar over 160 years ago, when he was in exile in Rangoon, still echoes through Delhi....

Aditya Sharma, TwoCircles.net New Delhi: When 33-year-old Khushboo Jaiswal walked into a private hospital in Delhi, she was expecting a calm and natural childbirth filled with gentle pushes and the rhythm of labour. Within hours, she found herself on an operating table. “I was admitted to a hospital in Burari, Central Delhi, when my water broke at home. The doctor said...

Adnan Ali, TwoCircles.net Indore: Madhya Pradesh's Indore, which is often celebrated as the cleanest in India, is facing a growing unease that has nothing to do with sanitation. The city is witnessing rising social tension as reports of alleged discrimination and boycott calls against the Muslim community often come to light. After targeting comedian Munawar Faruqui in the past, Eklavya Singh...

The Price of Injustice? Innocent Muslim Man Spent 9 Years in Jail, Now Demands Rs 9 Crore Nikhat Fatima, TwoCircles.net Wahid Shaikh, one of the 13 men accused in the 2006 Mumbai train blasts that killed 188 people and injured hundreds, was arrested by Maharashtra’s Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) for allegedly plotting the conspiracy. After nine long years in prison, he was acquitted...