praveen pai 🇮🇳

Just shows how little you saw, learnt, or understood. Crimes against women in India are among the highest in Bengal. Some of the recent cases of rape, torture, murder have been nothing short of chilling. What compounds the horror is the response: evasive, politicised, and at times shamefully indifferent, despite the state being led by a woman Chief Minister. And yet you walk away convinced that a woman’s status in Bengal is somehow exceptional. That isn’t insight, it’s selective blindness. When prejudice becomes the lens, reality is edited to fit convenience. Which is precisely why misusing your platform and your voice is not just irresponsible, it is a disservice to those who have no platform at all, and whose stories demand to be told without distortion or denial.

A 9-year-old in India saw two peacocks walking through dawn fog. She ran to her dad, grabbed his camera, knelt on the dirt, and took one photo. It placed at the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year, picked from almost 60,000 entries across 117 countries. The photographer is Shreyovi Mehta, who was in fifth grade at the time. The award is run by the Natural History Museum in London, the same museum with the giant whale skeleton hanging in the entrance hall. The competition has been running since 1965. People in the wildlife world call it the Oscars of wildlife photography. Shreyovi placed Runner-Up in the 10-and-Under category and her photo was hung in the Museum's 2024 exhibition. The shot was taken on a misty November morning in 2023 at Keoladeo National Park in Bharatpur, Rajasthan. The park used to be a royal duck-hunting reserve before becoming a UNESCO-protected bird sanctuary in 1985. Around 370 species of birds live there. Shreyovi was walking through the forest with her parents. Two peahens, female peacocks, came into view on a sunlit path under a tunnel of trees. She ran back to her dad, grabbed one of his cameras, dropped to the ground, and shot the picture from a low angle. An antelope walked into the right side of the frame just as she clicked. Look closely and you can see it. Her parents are both wildlife professionals. Her dad, Shivang Mehta, is a photographer; her mom, Kahini, co-founded a wildlife travel company called Nature Wanderers. That made Shreyovi the rare kid whose playground was a national park. Her first time holding a camera was at age 2. By her fourth birthday, she had already been to Kenya for a wildlife safari at Masai Mara. Even with that head start, the bar is brutal. Out of the almost 60,000 entries, the Museum picks 100 to display. Shreyovi was 9. The translated tweet calls her the winner. She actually placed Runner-Up in her age category. The overall 2024 winner was Shane Gross, a Canadian who spent hours snorkelling among lily pads to photograph tadpoles. But Shreyovi was a fifth grader from Faridabad, walking on a dirt path with her dad's camera, and she knew when to crouch.