Salt and Pepper

A fierce, witty portrait of a nation unraveling before our very eyes.

Salt and Pepper is a collection of literary columns that defy convention—acerbic, tender, unrelenting in their gaze. Written between the margins of news and national spectacle, these pieces are not topical commentary but something far more enduring: political satire that reads like poetry, reportage that mutates into parable, lament, and fable.

In these dispatches from a fractured republic, written over the past decade, journalist Sankarshan Thakur captures the surreal absurdities and deep disquiet of an India caught between thunderous assertion and muffled dissent. Governments speak in acronyms, mobs chant in hashtags, silence acquires a sound—and memory becomes an act of resistance. These are chronicles of a society slipping into curated amnesia, of belonging turned conditional, and of patriotism twisted into performance.

Yet Salt and Pepper is also suffused with wit and grace. Thakur’s voice, intimate and incantatory, does not lecture—it conjures. His writing laughs, rages, mourns. It asks what it means to remember, to speak, to stay human in a time that asks you to forget.

This is not a book of opinions. It is a reckoning.