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Jnanpith Award

Devanshi has been reading ever since she can remember. What started off as an obsession with Enid Blyton, slowly morphed into a love for mystery and fantasy. Even her choice of career as a lawyer was heavily influenced by the works of Erle Stanley Gardner and John Grisham. After quitting law, and while backpacking around India, she read books on entrepreneurship, taught herself web design and delved into social media marketing. She doesn’t go anywhere without a book.

She is the founding editor of The Curious Reader. Read her articles here .

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The author Niraj Srivastava of the international awards winning book ‘Daggers of Treason’ did not get due recognition in India. Although it won prestigious international awards like Beverly Hills Book Award( winner in multicultural section), runner up in London Book Festival and honourable mentions in many other, it did not get due recognition in India. The novel is based on life of Mughal emperor Khurram Shahjahan and is the first book of the series ” The Curse of the Mughal’. Brilliantly written the book has recently been picked up by Hollywood producers. Sad that Niraj Srivastava is still not recognised in Indian Literary world!You need to read his book to know his worth. More information can be gathered from his website http://www.nirajsrivastava.in

The author Praveen P Gopinath has written over 11 books and is a bilingual author. His book, ‘The Ravana Affair’ was truly mesmerizing and so was ‘People I See’, ‘God’and ‘The Meghanath Hunt.’ His writing is simple yet his words leave a mark on you long after you put down the book. He periodically updates his fan page with heart touching and sometimes humorous anecdotes https://www.facebook.com/incompleteman/

Should the novels be published by Indian Publications?

Hello. It depends on the award. We recommend you take a look at the guidelines posted by the respective awards.

Thank you for your comment.

How one can submit their book to consider for awards; when and whom, it is to be submitted

My wife has written Two books in English . how can she submit books for considerration of an award .She has sold more then 3000 books.

Hi Dharmendra,

Thank you for your comment. I recommend you look up the websites of the awards to find out the process for consideration.

I have penned down some stageplays in Hindi , some of which have received state awards ( Jammu and Kashmir) and national recognition also, performed by various theatre groups . I want my plays to reach some good platforms to be read by elite genre in the field so that I could get their feed back and guidance. Can you help

Hi Vikram. Thank you for writing to us.

Unfortunately, this is not in our scope. We wish you luck.

The award’s purpose is to recognize and promote excellence in Indian writing and also acknowledge new trends. The annual process of selecting awardees runs for the preceding twelve months. The plaque awarded by the Sahitya Akademi was designed by the Indian film-maker Satyajit Ray .

i liked the yuva puraskar.. its a great initiative specially for youngsters who have writing tallent

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The Winners of Our Personal Narrative Essay Contest

We asked students to write about a meaningful life experience. Here are the eight winning essays, as well as runners-up and honorable mentions.

By The Learning Network

Update: Join our live webinar on Oct. 8 about teaching with our Narrative Writing Contest.

In September, we challenged teenagers to write short, powerful stories about meaningful life experiences for our first-ever personal narrative essay contest .

This contest, like every new contest we start, was admittedly a bit of an experiment. Beyond a caution to write no more than 600 words, our rules were fairly open-ended, and we weren’t sure what we would get.

Well, we received over 8,000 entries from teenagers from around the world. We got stories about scoring the winning goal, losing a grandparent, learning to love one’s skin and dealing with mental illness. We got pieces that were moving, funny, introspective and honest. We got a snapshot of teenage life.

Judging a contest like this is, of course, subjective, especially with the range of content and styles of writing students submitted. But we based our criteria on the types of personal narrative essays The New York Times publishes in columns like Lives , Modern Love and Rites of Passage . We read many, many essays that were primarily reflective but, while these pieces might be well-suited for a college application, they weren’t exactly the short, powerful stories we were looking for in this contest.

The winning essays we selected were, though, and they all had a few things in common that set them apart:

They had a clear narrative arc with a conflict and a main character who changed in some way. They artfully balanced the action of the story with reflection on what it meant to the writer. They took risks, like including dialogue or playing with punctuation, sentence structure and word choice to develop a strong voice. And, perhaps most important, they focused on a specific moment or theme — a conversation, a trip to the mall, a speech tournament, a hospital visit — instead of trying to sum up the writer’s life in 600 words.

Below, you’ll find these eight winning essays, published in full. Scroll to the bottom to see the names of all 35 finalists we’re honoring — eight winners, eight runners-up and 19 honorable mentions. Congratulations, and thank you to everyone who participated!

The Winning Essays

Nothing extraordinary, pants on fire, eggs and sausage, first impressions, cracks in the pavement, sorry, wrong number, the man box.

By Jeniffer Kim

It was a Saturday. Whether it was sunny or cloudy, hot or cold, I cannot remember, but I do remember it was a Saturday because the mall was packed with people.

I was with my mom.

Mom is short. Skinny. It is easy to overlook her in a crowd simply because she is nothing extraordinary to see.

On that day we strolled down the slippery-slick tiles with soft, inconspicuous steps, peeking at window boutiques in fleeting glances because we both knew we wouldn’t be buying much, like always.

I remember I was looking up at the people we passed as we walked — at first apathetically, but then more attentively.

Ladies wore five-inch heels that clicked importantly on the floor and bright, elaborate clothing. Men strode by smelling of sharp cologne, faces clear of wrinkles — wiped away with expensive creams.

An uneasy feeling started to settle in my chest. I tried to push it out, but once it took root it refused to be yanked up and tossed away. It got more unbearable with every second until I could deny it no longer; I was ashamed of my mother.

We were in a high-class neighborhood, I knew that. We lived in a small, overpriced apartment building that hung on to the edge of our county that Mom chose to move to because she knew the schools were good.

We were in a high-class neighborhood, but as I scrutinized the passers-by and then turned accusing eyes on Mom, I realized for the first time that we didn’t belong there.

I could see the heavy lines around Mom’s eyes and mouth, etched deep into her skin without luxurious lotions to ease them away. She wore cheap, ragged clothes with the seams torn, shoes with the soles worn down. Her eyes were tired from working long hours to make ends meet and her hair too gray for her age.

I looked at her, and I was ashamed.

My mom is nothing extraordinary, yet at that moment she stood out because she was just so plain.

Mumbling I’d meet her at the clothes outlet around the corner, I hurried away to the bathroom. I didn’t want to be seen with her, although there was no one important around to see me anyway.

When I finally made my way to the outlet with grudging steps, I found that Mom wasn’t there.

With no other options, I had to scour the other stores in the area for her. I was dreading returning to her side, already feeling the secondhand embarrassment that I’d recently discovered came with being with her.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Mom was standing in the middle of a high-end store, holding a sweater that looked much too expensive.

She said, “This will look good on you. Do you want it?”

It was much too expensive. And I almost agreed, carelessly, thoughtlessly.

Then I took a closer look at the small, weary woman with a big smile stretching across her narrow face and a sweater in her hands, happy to be giving me something so nice, and my words died in my throat.

I felt like I’d been dropped into a cold lake.

Her clothes were tattered and old because she spent her money buying me new ones. She looked so tired and ragged all the time because she was busy working to provide for me. She didn’t wear jewelry or scented perfumes because she was just content with me.

Suddenly, Mother was beautiful and extraordinarily wonderful in my eyes.

I was no longer ashamed of her, but of myself.

“Do you want it?” My mom repeated.

“No thanks.”

By Varya Kluev

I never kissed the boy I liked behind the schoolyard fence that one March morning. I never had dinner with Katy Perry or lived in Kiev for two months either, but I still told my entire fourth-grade class I did.

The words slipped through my teeth effortlessly. With one flick of my tongue, I was, for all anybody knew, twenty-third in line for the throne of Monaco. “Actually?” the girls on the swings beside me would ask, wide eyes blinking with a childlike naivety. I nodded as they whispered under their breath how incredible my fable was. So incredible they bought into it without a second thought.

I lied purely for the ecstasy of it. It was narcotic. With my fabrications, I became the captain of the ship, not just a wistful passer-by, breath fogging the pane of glass that stood between me and the girls I venerated. No longer could I only see, not touch; a lie was a bullet, and the barrier shattered. My mere presence demanded attention — after all, I was the one who got a valentine from Jason, not them.

This way I became more than just the tomboyish band geek who finished her multiplication tables embarrassingly fast. My name tumbled out of their mouths and I manifested in the center of their linoleum lunch table. I became, at least temporarily, the fulcrum their world revolved around.

Not only did I lie religiously and unabashedly — I was good at it. The tedium of my everyday life vanished; I instead marched through the gates of my alcazar, strode up the steps of my concepts, and resided in my throne of deceit. I believed if I took off my fraudulent robe, I would become plebeian. The same aristocracy that finally held me in high regard would boot me out of my palace. To strip naked and exclaim, “Here’s the real me, take a look!” would lead my new circle to redraw their lines — they would take back their compliments, sit at the table with six seats instead of eight, giggle in the back of the class when I asked a question. I therefore adjusted my counterfeit diadem and continued to praise a Broadway show I had never seen.

Yet finally lounging in a lavender bedroom one long-sought-after day, after absently digesting chatter about shows I didn’t watch and boys I didn’t know, I started processing the floating conversations. One girl, who I had idolized for always having her heavy hair perfectly curled, casually shared how her parents couldn’t afford to go on their yearly trip the coming summer. I drew in an expectant breath, but nobody scoffed. Nobody exchanged a secret criticizing glance. Instead, another girl took her spoon of vanilla frosting out of her cheek and with the same air of indifference revealed how her family wasn’t traveling either. Promptly, my spun stories about swimming in crystal pools under Moroccan sun seemed to be in vain.

The following Monday, the girls on the bus to school still shared handfuls of chocolate-coated sunflower seeds with her. At lunch, she wasn’t shunned, wasn’t compelled to sit at a forgotten corner table. For that hour, instead of weaving incessant fantasies, I listened. I listened to the girls nonchalantly talk about yesterday’s soccer game where they couldn’t score a single goal. Listened about their parent’s layoff they couldn’t yet understand the significance of. I listened and I watched them listen, accepting and uncritical of one another no matter how relatively vapid their story. I then too began to talk, beginning by admitting that I wasn’t actually related to Britney Spears.

By Ryan Young Kim

When first I sat down in the small, pathetic excuse of a cafeteria the hospital had, I took a moment to reflect. I had been admitted the night before, rolled in on a stretcher like I had some sort of ailment that prevented me from walking.

But the nurses in the ward were nice to me, especially when they saw that I wasn’t going to be one of the violent ones. They started telling me something, but I paid no attention; I was trying to take in my surroundings. The tables were rounded, chairs were essentially plastic boxes with weight inside, and there was no real glass to be seen.

After they filled out the paperwork, the nurses escorted me to my room. There was someone already in there, but he was dead asleep. The two beds were plain and simple, with a cheap mattress on top of an equally cheap wooden frame. One nurse stuck around to hand me my bedsheets and a gown that I had to wear until my parents dropped off clothes.

The day had been exhausting, waiting for the psychiatric ward to tell us that there was a bed open for me and the doctors to fill out the mountains of paperwork that come with a suicide attempt.

Actually, there had been one good thing about that day. My parents had brought me Korean food for lunch — sullungtang , a fatty stew made from ox-bone broth. God, even when I was falling asleep I could still taste some of the rice kernels that had been mixed into the soup lingering around in my mouth.

For the first time, I felt genuine hunger. My mind had always been racked with a different kind of hunger — a pining for attention or just an escape from the toil of waking up and not feeling anything. But I always had everything I needed — that is, I always had food on my plate, maybe even a little too much. Now, after I had tried so hard to wrench myself away from this world, my basic human instinct was guiding me toward something that would keep me alive.

The irony was lost on me then. All I knew was that if I slept earlier, that meant less time awake being hungry. So I did exactly that. Waking up the next day, I was dismayed to see that the pangs of hunger still rumbled through my stomach. I slid off my covers and shuffled out of my room. The cafeteria door was already open, and I looked inside. There was a cart of Styrofoam containers in the middle of the room, and a couple people were eating quietly. I made my way in and stared.

I scanned the tops of the containers — they were all marked with names: Jonathan, Nathan, Kristen — and as soon as I spotted my name, my mouth began to water.

My dad would sometimes tell me about his childhood in a rural Korean village. The hardships he faced, the hunger that would come if the village harvest floundered, and how he worked so hard to get out — I never listened. But in that moment, between when I saw my container and I sat down at a seat to open it, I understood.

The eggs inside were watery, and their heat had condensated water all over, dripping onto everything and making the sausages soggy. The amount of ketchup was pitiful.

But if I hadn’t been given plastic utensils, I think I would have just shoved it all into my mouth, handful by handful.

By Isabel Hui

When I woke up on August 4, 2016, there was only one thing on my mind: what to wear. A billion thoughts raced through my brain as wooden hangers shuffled back and forth in the cramped hotel closet. I didn’t want to come off as a try-hard, but I also didn’t want to be seen as a slob. Not only was it my first day of high school, but it was my first day of school in a new state; first impressions are everything, and it was imperative for me to impress the people who I would spend the next four years with. For the first time in my life, I thought about how convenient it would be to wear the horrendous matching plaid skirts that private schools enforce.

It wasn’t insecurity driving me to madness; I was actually quite confident for a teenage girl. It was the fact that this was my third time being the new kid. Moving so many times does something to a child’s development … I struggled finding friends that I could trust would be there for me if I picked up and left again. But this time was different because my dad’s company ensured that I would start and finish high school in the same place. This meant no instant do-overs when I pick up and leave again. This time mattered, and that made me nervous.

After meticulously raiding my closet, I emerged proudly in a patterned dress from Target. The soft cotton was comfortable, and the ruffle shoulders added a hint of fun. Yes, this outfit was the one. An hour later, I felt just as powerful as I stepped off the bus and headed toward room 1136. But as I turned the corner into my first class, my jaw dropped to the floor.

Sitting at her desk was Mrs. Hutfilz, my English teacher, sporting the exact same dress as I. I kept my head down and tiptoed to my seat, but the first day meant introductions in front of the whole class, and soon enough it was my turn. I made it through my minute speech unscathed, until Mrs. Hutfilz stood up, jokingly adding that she liked my style. Although this was the moment I had been dreading from the moment I walked in, all the anxiety that had accumulated throughout the morning surprisingly melted away; the students who had previously been staring at their phones raised their heads to pay attention as I shared my story. My smile grew as I giggled with my peers, ending my speech with “and I am very stylish, much like my first period teacher.” After class, I stayed behind and talked to Mrs. Hutfilz, sharing my previous apprehension about coming into a new school and state. I was relieved to make a humorous and genuine connection with my first teacher, one that would continue for the remainder of the year.

This incident reminded me that it’s only high school; these are the times to have fun, work hard, and make memories, not stress about the trivial details. Looking back four years later, the ten minutes I spent dreading my speech were really not worth it. While my first period of high school may not have gone exactly the way I thought it would, it certainly made the day unforgettable in the best way, and taught me that Mrs. Hutfilz has an awesome sense of style!

By Adam Bernard Sanders

It was my third time sitting there on the middle school auditorium stage. The upper chain of braces was caught in my lip again, and my palms were sweating, and my glasses were sliding down my nose. The pencil quivered in my hands. All I had to do was answer whatever question Mrs. Crisafulli, the history teacher, was going to say into that microphone. I had answered 26 before that, and 25 of those correctly. And I was sitting in my chair, and I was tapping my foot, and the old polo shirt I was wearing was starting to constrict and choke me. I pulled pointlessly at the collar, but the air was still on the outside, only looking at the inside of my throat. I was going to die.

I could taste my tongue in my mouth shriveling up. I could feel each hard-pumping heartbeat of blood travel out of my chest, up through my neck and down my arms and legs, warming my already-perspiring forehead but leaving my ghost-white fingers cold and blue. My breathing was quick. My eyes were glassy. I hadn’t even heard the question yet.

Late-night readings of my parents’ anatomy textbooks had told me that a sense of impending doom was the hallmark of pulmonary embolism, a fact that often bubbled to the surface of my mind in times like these. Almost by instinct, I bent my ring and little fingers down, holding them with my thumb as the two remaining digits whipped to my right wrist and tried to take my pulse. Mr. Mendoza had taught us this last year in gym class. But I wasn’t in gym class that third period. I was just sitting on the metal folding chair, waiting for Mrs. Crisafulli to flip to the right page in her packet for the question.

Arabella had quizzed me in second-period French on the lakes of Latin America. Nicaragua. Atitlán. Yojoa. Lake Titicaca, that had made Raj, who sat in front of me, start giggling, and Shannon, who sat three desks up and one to the left, whip her head around and raise one fist to her lips, jab up her index finger, and silence us. Lakes were fed by rivers, the same rivers that lined the globe on my desk like the cracks in the pavement I liked to trace with my shoe on the walk home. Lake Nicaragua drains into the San Juan River, which snakes its way around the port of Granada to empty into the Caribbean Sea. I knew that.

At that moment I was only sure of those two things: the location of Lake Nicaragua and my own impending doom. And I was so busy counting my pulse and envisioning my demise that I missed Mrs. Crisafulli’s utterance of the awaited question into her microphone, as I had each year in the past as one of the two people left onstage.

“ … Coldest … on earth,” was all I heard. My pencil etched shaggy marks as my shaking hands attempted to write something in the 20 seconds remaining.

“Asia,” I scrawled.

So, for the third time in three years, I got it wrong, and for the third time, I didn’t die. I walked home that day, tracing the faults in the pavement and wondering what inside me was so cracked and broken. Something had to be fissured inside, like the ridges and rivers on my desk globe that I would throw out later that evening, but fish from the trash can when the sun rose the next day.

By Michelle Ahn

My phone buzzes. An unfamiliar number with a 512 area code — I later find out it’s from Texas. It’s a selfie of a 30-something man, smiling with his family, a strange picture to receive as I live halfway across the country.

For the past three years, I — a 14-year-old girl living in Virginia — have been getting texts meant for this man, Jared. Over the years, I’ve pieced together parts of who he is; middle-aged, Caucasian, and very popular according to the numerous messages I’ve received for him.

Throughout this time, I’ve also been discovering who I am. When I received the first text, I was a playful sixth grader, always finding sly ways to be subversive in school and with friends. With this new method of mischief in my hands, naturally, I engaged:

“My sweet momma just told me that BYU Texas Club is holding a Texas Roundup free BBQ dinner on October 10th! Thought y’all would enjoy,” came one of the texts.

After staring at the message for a while, I responded.

As time went on, the story of the mystery man deepened. I was halfway through sixth grade, for example, when I learned he was part of the “Elder’s Quorum,” a rather ominous-sounding group. Looking it up, I learned that it was not a cult, as I’d initially thought, but rather an elite inner circle within the Mormon Church.

This was around the same time my family had stopped going to church. I’d started to spend more time taking art classes and trying out various sports — tennis, basketball, even archery — and soon church fell to the side. Instead, I meddled in the Quorum’s group texts; when a message came about a member moving away, I excitedly responded, “Let me help y’all out, brother!”

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but after a while I started to feel guilty about this deception. I wondered if I’d somehow ruined Jared’s reputation, if his friends were turned off by my childish responses. I was also dealing with changes within my friend group at the time; the biggest change being letting go of a close but toxic friend; I realized that I needed friendships that were more mutually supportive.

Shortly after, I got a phone call from a strange woman. She started talking about the struggles in her life; her children, her job, even about how she wanted to leave Texas forever. In comparison, my own problems — the B minus I’d gotten, the stress of an upcoming archery tournament, the argument I had with my sister — all seemed superficial. I timidly informed her I wasn’t Jared, and her flustered response told me that I should have told her at the start of the call.

A while later, I got another text: “Congratulations on getting married!” It had never occurred to me how much Jared’s life had changed since I had received his number. But of course it did; over time, I’d outgrown my prankster middle school self, gained the confidence to build a solid friend group, and devoted myself to my primary loves of art and archery. Why wouldn’t Jared also be settling into his own life too?

Though I’ve since taken every opportunity to correct those who text Jared, it still happens every once in a while. Just last month, I got another random text; all it said was: “Endoscopy!” When I got it, I laughed, and then I wrote back.

“Hey, sorry, you have the wrong number. But I hope Jared’s doing well.”

By Maria Fernanda Benavides

“Mayfier? Marfir?” the tournament judge called squinting her eyes, trying to find the spelling error, although there was no error.

“It’s Mafer. It’s a nickname for my full name, Maria Fernanda.”

She stared at me blankly.

“My parents are creative,” I lied, and she laughed.

“O.K., Mahfeer, you’re up!”

I walk to the center and scanned the room before starting as instructed. I took a deep breath.

I reminded myself, “Use your voice.”

I spoke loudly at first, trying to hide the fact that I was overthinking every single word that came out of my mouth. As my performance continued, the artificial confidence became natural, and I started speaking from my heart as I told the story of my experience as an immigrant woman, and I described how much I missed my father who had to travel back and forth every weekend to see my mom and me, and how disconnected I felt from my family, and how I longed to have a place I could call home.

My performance came to an end, and I made my way back to my seat with newly found optimism as I reflected on how performing had consumed me.

I used my voice. Finally. I had found my home in the speech program.

Waiting for the speech tournament to post the names of the finalists was excruciating. I jumped off my seat every time a staff member passed by. I didn’t care about accumulating state points or individual recognition. I wanted the chance to speak again.

Finally, a girl walked up to the oratory postings with a paper on her hand, and the entire cafeteria surrounded her, impatiently waiting to see who the finalists were. Then, I saw it.

My name. Written in dense, black letters.

I smiled to myself.

This time, as I walked to the oratory final, I did so by myself, as I had finally acquired self-assurance needed to navigate the quiet hallways of the high school. I could only hear the heels of the two girls behind me.

“I heard that Saint Mary’s Hall freshman made it to oratory finals,” one of them said, obviously speaking about me. “She broke over me. I didn’t see her performance. Did you? Did you see her performance? What is her speech about?” she questioned the other one.

“It’s about being a Mexican immigrant.”

“Oh, so that’s why she broke.”

“It’s the same pity narrative, there’s nothing different about it.”

Suddenly, the confidence that I had acquired from the previous rounds vanished, and I found myself wishing that I had my older, more experienced teammates by my side to help me block the girls’ words. But no one was there.

I thought my narrative was what made my words matter, what made me matter.

But they didn’t matter. Not anymore. From that moment on, I knew I would be recognized around the circuit as the Mexican girl whose name no one knows how to pronounce. I didn’t even need to speak about my identity to be identified. Everyone would recognize me not for my achievement or my being, but by the peculiar way I pronounce words. I could speak about different topics, but it felt like it wouldn’t make a difference. It felt like my voice didn’t make a difference.

“Mafer, how did it feel?” my coach asked me after the round. “It felt amazing!” I lied.

I didn’t feel anything. Not anymore. Speech gave me a voice, but it also took it away.

By Gordon Lewis

We’re all average boys: hard working in school, spending every minute together in the summer, and doing our best to pretend we don’t have a worry in the world. The facts are no different as the sun is beginning to set on a warm July evening. Sam and I say goodbye to Ben, stepping out of our best friend’s house.

“My sister is going to pick me up while we’re walking, is that O.K.?” I ask.

“Actually, she can probably drive you home, too.”

“Sounds good,” says Sam, but lacking his usual upbeat, comedic energy. Neither of us says anything else, but I’m O.K. with it, we just keep walking. I look around, admiring the still, peaceful park as the warm summer breeze brushes across my face. The crickets are chirping and an owl sings along between the soft hum of cars rolling along nearby. It’s nature’s tune of serenity.

I almost forgot Sam was with me until he asked, “Can I ask you kind of a weird question?”

“Sure,” I say, expecting a joke in poor taste as per usual.

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” he says before asking.

More hesitantly, I say, “O.K.”

“Do you have someone that you talk to about like deeper stuff … Like more emotional stuff?” Silence hits us like a brick wall: The crickets stop chirping, the owl stops hooting, even the cars stop driving by. It’s deafening. I’m only shocked at the question because it’s Sam, one of the happiest and funniest people I know.

I’m wondering. My disappointment takes over just as quickly as my hope fades as I fail to come up with a name. In the end, the closest thing I can think of is the book I occasionally write in when I’m feeling sad or stressed.

“Huh,” I say quietly, “I’ve never really thought about that, but I guess not.”

“Yeah, I didn’t either, but at camp we did activities and had talks that led to more emotional conversations.” I’m silently both jealous and proud of him, but it’s mostly jealousy.

“It’s funny,” I say, “in English we always joked about that TED Talk guy talking about the man box, but it’s actually so true. We shouldn’t feel like we can’t talk about deeper stuff like that.”

“Yeah,” laughed Sam. Silence drapes over us again, but this time it’s more comfortable. I’m lost in my thoughts trying to think of what to say next, but there’s too much. I’ve never had an opportunity like this before. However it’s not shocking or overwhelming, even though it’s with Sam of all people — instead it’s therapeutic.

The silence is broken once again by Sam:

“Like I never told you guys that my parents got divorced.”

“I’m-I’m sorry,” I say, “That really sucks.” I’m disappointed in myself for not saying more.

“It’s O.K.,” Sam says, but I know he’s lying. I can feel his sadness.

Drowning in my thoughts, I try to pick out something to say. But there’s too much to say. There are too many options after being silent for 16 years.

Headlights appear in front of us, and for a split second I’m relieved, but it rapidly turns into regret.

Knowing it’s Rose, I quickly tell sam, “If you ever want to talk again just let me know.”

I say hi to Rose, masking my solemn, thoughtful mood as tiredness. The warm breeze gives my cheek one final kiss; nature resumes her number, and the cars roll by again as Sam and I reluctantly step into the car.

In alphabetical order by the writer’s last name

“Sorry, Wrong Number” by Michelle Ahn

“Speechless” by Maria Fernanda Benavides

“First Impressions” by Isabel Hui

“Nothing Extraordinary” by Jeniffer Kim

“Eggs and Sausage" by Ryan Young Kim

“Pants on Fire” by Varya Kluev

“The Man Box” by Gordon Lewis

“Cracks in the Pavement” by Adam Bernard Sanders

“The First (and Last) Time Speedy Wasn’t Speedy Enough” by Maya Berg

“Searching for Air” by Sydney Do

“Fear on My Mind” by Daytona Gerhardy

“Under the Starry Sky” by Letian Li

“Chinatown Diptych” by Jeffrey Liao

“They” by Haven Low

“The Vigil” by Beda Lundstedt

“How My Brother Taught Me to Drive” by Sarah Shapiro

Honorable Mentions

“The Six in Mid-August” by Liah Argiropoulos

“‘Those Aren’t Scratches Are They?’” by Casey Barwick

“Brown Is Beautiful” by Tiffany Borja

“I Am Ordinary, After All” by Rebecca Braxley

“Torn” by Melanie D.

“The Stupid Seven” by Madeline G.

“Speak No Evil” by Amita Goyal

“Building My Crown” by Ambar Guzman

“Me, Myself, and a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich” by Zachary Hommel

“The Tomato” by Raymond Huang

“Out” by Michael H.

“Cold Noodles With a Side of Birdballs” by Audrey Koh

“Banya in Siberia” by Arshiya Sanghi

“Traffic” by Kecia Seo

“The Power of Ambiguity” by Marcus Shallow

“Land Mine” by Geneve Thomas-Palmer

“How to Fall Asleep With the Lights On” by Caroline Wei

“The Taste of Tofu” by Amy Zhou

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The best essays: the 2021 pen/diamonstein-spielvogel award, recommended by adam gopnik.

WINNER OF the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

Every year, the judges of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay search out the best book of essays written in the past year and draw attention to the author's entire body of work. Here, Adam Gopnik , writer, journalist and PEN essay prize judge, emphasizes the role of the essay in bearing witness and explains why the five collections that reached the 2021 shortlist are, in their different ways, so important.

Interview by Benedict King

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick

Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle

Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé

Maybe the People Would be the Times by Luc Sante

1 Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

2 unfinished business: notes of a chronic re-reader by vivian gornick, 3 nature matrix: new and selected essays by robert michael pyle, 4 terroir: love, out of place by natasha sajé, 5 maybe the people would be the times by luc sante.

W e’re talking about the books shortlisted for the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay . As an essayist yourself, or as a reader of essays, what are you looking for? What’s the key to a good essay ?

Let’s turn to the books that made the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay. The winning book was Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich , whose books have been recommended a number of times on Five Books. Tell me more. 

One of the criteria for this particular prize is that it should be not just for a single book, but for a body of work. One of the things we wanted to honour about Barbara Ehrenreich is that she has produced a remarkable body of work. Although it’s offered in a more specifically political register than some essayists, or that a great many past prize winners have practised, the quiddity of her work is that it remains rooted in personal experience, in the act of bearing witness. She has a passionate political point to make, certainly, a series of them, many seeming all the more relevant now than when she began writing. Nonetheless, her writing still always depends on the intimacy of first-hand knowledge, what people in post-incarceration work call ‘lived experience’ (a term with a distinguished philosophical history). Her book Nickel and Dimed is the classic example of that. She never writes from a distance about working-class life in America. She bears witness to the nature and real texture of working-class life in America.

“One point of giving awards…is to keep passing the small torches of literary tradition”

Next up of the books on the 2021 PEN essay prize shortlist is Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick.

Vivian Gornick is a writer who’s been around for a very long time. Although longevity is not in itself a criterion for excellence—or for this prize, or in the writing life generally—persistence and perseverance are. Writers who keep coming back at us, again and again, with a consistent vision, are surely to be saluted. For her admirers, her appetite to re-read things already read is one of the most attractive parts of her oeuvre , if I can call it that; her appetite not just to read but to read deeply and personally. One of the things that people who love her work love about it is that her readings are never academic, or touched by scholarly hobbyhorsing. They’re readings that involve the fullness of her experience, then applied to literature. Although she reads as a critic, she reads as an essayist reads, rather than as a reviewer reads. And I think that was one of the things that was there to honour in her body of work, as well.

Is she a novelist or journalist, as well?

Let’s move on to the next book which made the 2021 PEN essay shortlist. This is Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle.

I have a special reason for liking this book in particular, and that is that it corresponds to one of the richest and oldest of American genres, now often overlooked, and that’s the naturalist essay. You can track it back to Henry David Thoreau , if not to Ralph Waldo Emerson , this American engagement with nature , the wilderness, not from a narrowly scientific point of view, nor from a purely ecological or environmental point of view—though those things are part of it—but again, from the point of view of lived experience, of personal testimony.

Let’s look at the next book on the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Awards, which is Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé. Why did these essays appeal?

One of the things that was appealing about this book is that’s it very much about, in every sense, the issues of the day: the idea of place, of where we are, how we are located on any map as individuals by ethnic identity, class, gender—all of those things. But rather than being carried forward in a narrowly argumentative way, again, in the classic manner of the essay, Sajé’s work is ruminative. It walks around these issues from the point of view of someone who’s an expatriate, someone who’s an émigré, someone who’s a world citizen, but who’s also concerned with the idea of ‘terroir’, the one place in the world where we belong. And I think the dialogue in her work between a kind of cosmopolitanism that she has along with her self-critical examination of the problem of localism and where we sit on the world, was inspiring to us.

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Last of the books on the shortlist for the 2021 Pen essay award is Maybe the People Would Be the Times by Luc Sante.

Again, here’s a writer who’s had a distinguished generalised career, writing about lots of places and about lots of subjects. In the past, he’s made his special preoccupation what he calls ‘low life’, but I think more broadly can be called the marginalized or the repressed and abject. He’s also written acute introductions to the literature of ‘low life’, the works of Asbury and David Maurer, for instance.

But I think one of the things that was appealing about what he’s done is the sheer range of his enterprise. He writes about countless subjects. He can write about A-sides and B-sides of popular records—singles—then go on to write about Jacques Rivette’s cinema. He writes from a kind of private inspection of public experience. He has a lovely piece about tabloid headlines and their evolution. And I think that omnivorous range of enthusiasms and passions is a stirring reminder in a time of specialization and compartmentalization of the essayist’s freedom to roam. If Pyle is in the tradition of Thoreau, I suspect Luc Sante would be proud to be put in the tradition of Baudelaire—the flaneur who walks the streets, sees everything, broods on it all and writes about it well.

One point of giving awards, with all their built-in absurdity and inevitable injustice, is to keep alive, or at least to keep passing, the small torches of literary tradition. And just as much as we’re honoring the great tradition of the naturalist essay in the one case, I think we’re honoring the tradition of the Baudelairean flaneur in this one.

April 18, 2021

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Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1986. His many books include A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism . He is a three time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays & Criticism, and in 2021 was made a chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur by the French Republic.

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Read the winning essay entry from our essay writing competition on adolescent health

Australian High Commissioner to India, Ms Harinder Kaur Sidhu gave away the prizes to winners of an essay writing competition on adolescent health organized by The George Institute for Global Health India during the 10th year anniversary event on December 15, 2017, at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi

The topic of the essay was ‘What would you like your policymakers to know about your health? The competition was open for class 9th to 12th standard students from Delhi and Chandigarh. We received 334 essay submissions out of which we initially short-listed top 12.

The short-listed essays were reviewed by a 3 member jury - Dr Pallab Maulik, Deputy Director and Ms Neeti Sharma, Human Resource Manager at The George Institute for Global Health India and Mr Amit Dasgupta, Former Indian Ambassador to Australia and India Head of UNSW Sydney. The jury said,

"All the 12 essay entries were really direct and written straight from the heart. Students covered a wide range of issues relating to their health. It was really difficult to choose 2 finalists"

Pahul Singh , a class 11 th  student from Learning Paths School, Mohali won the  first prize , and

Anuj Sharma, a   class 12 th  student from Air Force School Subroto Park, New Delhi got the second prize .

Read the complete essay by Pahul Singh from LPS, Mohali, first prize winner:

It was the 20th of September 2013 when I was woken up by a sudden and abrupt noise. As soon as I came to my senses, rubbing my eyes, I realized that the dusty glass window of my room had shattered. I did not panic. I was as still as a mountain. it was not a new incident to me. In these beautiful valleys of Kashmir, such things happen almost every day. Kashmir is the mother that carries immense pain in her womb. she is a beautiful lie. The closer you look, the farther you will want to go.   I went outside to get a glimpse of what had led to the happening. To my surprise, there was a broken pane, some loud voices and above all an overpowering yet familiar groan. I tried to lift him, I tried to hold his hand. He added,” I cant die. Call the ambulance.” His glimmering eyes had a message deeper than ocean.. How could I let him go?   I ran inside to make a call to the ambulance. I had to make an effort, after all, we make efforts for the ones we love. I called them up. A humble voice spoke. The receptionist assured that they would reach in 30 minutes. I was extremely anxious but I waited. I did.   Guess what? This only and the ultimate regret I have experienced in my life. had I focused on finding a cure other than just first aid and waiting for the stupid vehicle, I would have saved my father. I saw him after so long.   So here I am, a child who just buried her family member, still in grief, writing a letter to the amazing health policy makers of this country requesting them to return the life of my father because all we asked was a genuine help.   To, Policy makers, 106, Kashmir valley. 25th September 2013.   Subject:  Request to return my father .   Respected sir/ madam,   I am an ordinary citizen of this country who lost her soldier, her hero because of the carelessness of your department as an ambulance could not arrive at my residence on time. Nevertheless, I applaud the health policies you make. The health policies assuring free medical care to cancer patients, the distribution of clean water services, the help to the poor and needy, the enlightenment of teaching them about sanitation, awareness about open defecate and so on.   Looking at these currently prevailing health policies, could you please give me a valid reason for why was my father an exception that he could not be helped?   Let me be less selfish here. Let me look at this as a broad subject. Let me highlight what you need to know about our health. When a policy is drafted its only aim is to benefit the citizens in every possible way. But the implementations fail. they fail so bad that people have to lose their lives. This isn’t worth it. Is it?   The things you genuinely need to know are that your doctors do not fulfill their responsibilities. They with the profit earning motive, forget the needs of a patient. They irrespective of a healthy income, run away to private hospitals in order to earn more. I wonder why a government doctor cannot be given regular visits by officers to make sure he is working honestly. I also question you that can you not make sure that every doctor gets the desired salary without corruption so that his greed can be controlled?   You might be glad to know that every other teen in this country is suffering from one or the other mental disorder. It ranges from a minor case of sadness or social negligence to severe cases of depression, anxiety, and suicide. I would love to know that why can the parents were not made aware via workshops about what exactly their child feels? Why can a teen not have an access to a psychologist whenever he/ she needs? Why is there a lack of awareness among teens about how to tackle their hormones? Why can these not be worked on?   In this country sex is a taboo. People would never talk about this. They run away. It is ignorance that leads to wrong ideologies .the lack of awareness leads to ugly expectations. Sex education is a must. Making children of age groups 12-14 aware of what sex is and why is it important and when is it necessary will make a wiser generation. All it needs is a few good workshops. Only when they are taught to respect such a fact will they start valuing life. one very important benefit is that the rape culture would reduce and if possible, it might just be eradicated completely. What are you waiting for?   With a grimace on my face and a rage in my heart, I would want to know why can every public washroom not have access to sanitary napkins? The ability to bleed in order to create a new life is something to be celebrated and not be ashamed of. Women must know that it is their right to have access to sanitary napkins. They deserve it for free and irrespective of that many women of this country use cotton, leaves, leftover clothes and what not to protect themselves? What makes it so hard to make these napkins reach the needy?   You also might like the fact that many lives are lost every day just because there are issues related to cleanliness. There are cases of dengue, zika virus and malaria every now and then. Could you please inform me that why can you not prevent these? Why can public places not be kept clean? Why are the puddles of water never repaired? Why are the policy makers so lazy in implementation?   There are innumerable issues I can bring up in order to criticize you. I am trying to reflect the fact that there are cures possible to almost everything on this planet.   The information which I have, the person next to me does not. It is not a matter of pride that the policies fail to work. As an ordinary citizen, I have a humble request to make. Please stop taking away all our basic necessities. Countries like the USA provide health insurance to all their citizens. They are safe no matter where they are. They have policies similar to ours but the only fact is that they are implemented no matter what. The rules are harsh. The care and concern are expressed. Can we at least try to reach that standard? Not only you, all of us would cooperate whenever it is needed. But can we try for once?   It isn’t easy to lose your loved ones because of mere carelessness and causalities. We look up to your department for help. We seek your attention to almost all our problems. We need you at every step of the way. Kindly stop running away. Kindly help us when we need you.   I know you cannot return me my father but kindly let not others lose them.

Below are the names of 10 students who also won commendation certificates for their essays:

• Shaumali Bhagwat, Airforce School, Subroto Park, New Delhi
• Laavni Kumar, Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, New Delhi
• Jasgun Kaur, Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, New Delhi
• Chiranjeev Banerjee, Learning Paths School, Mohali, 
• Nishita, St. Theresa Convent, Chandigarh
• Pranav Bhardwaj, Maxford School, Dwarka, New Delhi
• Antriksh Shiva, Maxford School, Dwarka, New Delhi
• Anukriti Verma, KBDAV senior secondary public school, Chandigarh
• Saumya Sharma, KBDAV senior secondary public school, Chandigarh
• Aryan Gautam, KBDAV senior secondary public school, Chandigarh

Further reading

Report shows adolescent girls aged 15-17 years had the poorest outcomes in relation to uhc in india.

The George Institute for Global Health celebrated its 10th Anniversary in India

Celebrating 10 years of medical and public health research in India

Essay writing competition - Adolescent health

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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• Indian J Med Res
• v.149(Suppl 1); 2019 Jan

GANDHI & HEALTH: Award-Winning Essay in Competition Organized by ICMR celebrating 150 th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi

C.h. shafneed.

All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India

“It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.” – M.K. Gandhi

When Gandhiji's name is taken in the context of health, it's essential to quote him. He believed in giving away the materialism that's often seen in the present India. Health is always the real wealth and, along with education, is the corner stone for a long-lasting sustainable development.

Examining India's health sector, government expenditure in the sector amounted to 1.15 per cent of GDP and overall expenditure was 4.02 per cent in the year of 2013–14. This is dismal as compared to other countries with less GDP per capita, like Vietnam which spends 14.2 per cent or Nicaragua's 24 per cent. This may be extrapolated to the country's performance in healthcare access and quality index, life expectancy at birth, infant mortality rate (IMR) or maternal mortality rate (MMR). For instance, IMR for the year of 2015 was 37 in India, whereas it was 11 and 10 for Vietnam and Nicaragua respectively. Household out-of-pocket health spending was 69.1 per cent of total health expenditures, making it a major issue in alleviating poverty. There exists significant disparity among Indian states, rural and urban areas, socioeconomic groups, religions, castes and genders in terms of healthcare access. Children in rural areas are about 1.6 times more likely to die before their first birthday and 1.9 times more likely to die before their fifth birthday in comparison to their urban counterparts. Individuals from impoverished backgrounds face similar disparity with ageing making the disparity more apparent. Individuals from scheduled castes and tribes had poorer self-rated health and higher rate of disability as compared to individuals from less impoverished background.

The constitution of India guarantees the ‘right to life’ as a fundamental right and makes the ‘right to health’ an obligation for the government. But to label it as solely the responsibility of the government is in disregard to the ways Gandhiji had taught us to live. Health is a choice in a continuum and the result is from collective decisions on your lifestyle, environment, thought and spirituality, not merely what you may derive from a health care provider. Gandhiji had a view that modern medicine was the bane of man and was used to circumvent our own shortfalls of lifestyle. When our body tells us our ways of life have been corrupted, we resort to the shortcut of medicines and do not face the need for lifestyle changes.

He believed in his eleven vows, namely ‘Non-violence, Truth, Control over Palate (taste), Celibacy, Physical work, Non-stealing, Non-possession, Fearlessness, Removal of caste barrier, Equality in religion, Swadeshi or self-reliance.’ These eleven vows are aimed at transforming the individual from a root level, which would inflict on him personality changes that would lead to a holistic development, both for the individual and the nation as a whole. Much of these eleven vows will be examined here, and analyzed in the context of our health system, if not endorsed wholly.

One of the most popular books to be authored by Gandhiji is Key to Health . His idea of one's health is body to ease. World Health Organization (WHO), in the preamble to its constitution, defines health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely an absence of disease or infirmity . It has been further amplified to include the ability to lead a socially and economically productive life . Gandhiji's teaching insists on one having a knowledge of one's self and body to lead a healthy life. He states that the human body is composed of five elements, which ancient philosophers have described as Earth, Water, Light, Air, and Vacancy or Ether. He believed in nature's ability to heal and the body's power in regaining its composure. But the interplay of the above said elements is an absolute necessity in paving the way. Breathing exercises for those who can’t breathe, cleaning nostrils, sleeping under the sky, hydrotherapy, sun baths and mud poultices are all Gandhiji's advice on improving health. But unfortunately we have polluted our earth, water and air, have harmed Ether which helps to maintain and regain health. In recent years, it has been nearly impossible to live in majority of Indian cities, which have been consistently named as some of the most polluted cities in the world. The impact of this level of pollution will be a major health and economic crisis for India in the coming years.

Dr. Sushila Nayyar, Kasturba and Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (centre; from left) in a prayer meeting while visiting epidemic-stricken villages in Gujarat, 1940.

Gandhiji was not a man with materialistic urges. He observed brahmacharya and stated that it leads to a healthy life. Practising self-restraint of the senses and keeping control of thoughts and actions are paramount in having a healthy life. Brahmacharya is very often wrongly attributed to just sexual abstinence, but it was linked inseparably to truth and non-violence by Mahatma Gandhi. It was also the basis for his disinterest in worldly pleasures. This needs to be addressed in the present Indian scenario of lifestyle epidemics. On one hand, we have 20 per cent of children under five years suffering from wasting due to undernutrition, whereas on the other hand we have children who are overweight or obese. Somewhere between 5.74 and 8.82 per cent of school children in India are obese. The consequences of this are earlier puberty and menarchy in girls, type 2 diabetes mellitus, and increased incidents of the metabolic syndrome in youth and adults and obesity in adulthood. These changes are associated with various malignancies, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. It has to be understood that higher socio-economic status is not the reason for obesity/overweight. In a study among the urban slum dwelling daily wage laborers, prevalence of obesity was found to be high. It was found that distorted ideals and current body image percepts were significant risk factor for their obesity. As Gandhiji said, “Everything in the world can be used and abused and it applies to our body too. We abuse it when we use it for selfish purposes, to harm our body. It is put to right use if we exercise self-restraint and dedicate ourselves to the service of the whole world.” Gandhiji favoured vegetarianism over a mixed or non-vegetarian diet. He states the importance of milk, cereals, pulses, fruits, vegetables, fat and the need to keep a balanced proportion of them in the diet. Also to be read in this context is “one must not live in order to eat and drink and be merry, but eat and drink in order to make bodies temples of God and to use them for the service of man.”

Mahatma Gandhi addressing a meeting of the villagers at Vera village in the plague effected area, May 1935. From left: Manibehn Patel, Kasturba Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Mahadev Desai.

Drugs, drinks and smoking cigarettes were among the other things he advised against. He said, “Drugs and drinks are the two arms of the devil with which he strikes his helpless slaves into stupefaction and intoxication.” He gave various reasons for drinking and smoking during his period such as imitating the rich, addiction formed during medicinal use, to get assistance from whites during British rule, environment and social disorganization, easy availability of it, etc. The effects lead to financial loss as well as moral loss. Gandhiji pointed various ill-effects of smoking like impaired eye-sight, problems in digestion, etc. Gandhiji further implied that “if every smoker stopped the dirty habit of making his mouth a chimney to foul breath by making a present of his savings to some national cause, he would benefit both himself and the nation.” But 150 years down the line, the prevalence of alcohol and smoking among Indians is still high. Smoking prevalence was as high as 71.8 per cent in men and 41.1 per cent in women among elderly population of the rural areas. Regular alcohol intake was seen in 16.3 per cent of the men compared with 0.8 per cent of the women. It has also caused an increase in lifestyle diseases and malignancies, including lung and oral cancers. This spread of addiction is also because of its increased availability. As manufacturing and sales have been a major revenue for the government, it has shown a blind eye to its wide prevalence. Tactics of putting precautionary image and warnings on boxes are no longer having the desired effect. What we need are regulations on manufacturing and distribution even though it may result in revenue fall for the government. The country may take the path of states like Gujarat and Bihar in the liquor ban, but care should be taken in educating people and creating awareness about illicit liquor. One other solace is that some reports have suggested a decreasing prevalence of urban smokers, but with an increase in prevalence of smoking among women.

One of the most important reason for illness in India is the defective and harmful method of defecation. Unhygienic toilets and defecating in open leads to major diseases. He stressed the importance of maintaining personal hygiene and making surroundings clean. He had then wanted us to imitate western countries regarding cleanliness. Ever since he established a community in Phoenix, South Africa, he made the cleaning of the campus a common activity for everyone. He advised every person to become a bhanghi, i.e. , a sweeper to maintain cleanliness and he himself practised this. In Phoenix, the job of cleaning toilets, considered to be the dirtiest job, was taken up voluntarily by Gandhiji himself until it became a natural part of the whole process of sanitation. He conducted experiments in Sevagram with different type of latrines to make the cleaning process free of offensive smell and to use them as night soil for fertilizing farms. This made the process hygienic, economically productive as well socially important. Cleaning toilet was the allotted task to newcomers at the Ashram to test their willingness to change their lifestyle and also as an act of initiation in the Ashram way of living.

Mental health and disorders are another area of concern in India. WHO estimates that the burden of mental health problems is in the tune of 2,443 per 100,000 population and age-adjusted suicide rate per 100,000 population is 21.1. Determinants of mental health are not just the ability to manage one's thoughts, emotions, behaviours and interactions with others, but also national policies, social protection, living standards, working conditions and community social support. Specific psychological and personality factors also contribute towards the vulnerability. Mahatma Gandhi was included by Agnes Maude Royden, a preacher and suffragist, in a series of her addresses on ‘Makers of Modern Thought’. In Gandhi can be found an integration of life. If his beliefs in spirituality, better social integration, endless love for other living beings, non-violence, truth and moral values, were to be followed, it would have a significant impact on mental health of individuals.

Mahatma Gandhi with Kasturba, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and others during his visit to the plague affected villages in Borsad, Gujarat, May 1935.

India has so far made significant progress by taking some guidance from Gandhian views. India's health sector has been shaped by its federal structure and the federal-state divisions of responsibilities and financing. The central government is responsible for international health treaties, medical education, prevention of food adulteration, quality control in drug manufacturing, national disease control and family planning programs. States organize and implement these health services and deliver to its residents. Gandhiji believed that the ‘future of India lies in its villages’, and so would its health. India has effectively implemented the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) by recognizing the importance of health in the process of social and economic development and to improve the quality of life of its citizens. This was further strengthened by creating the cadre of Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA), resident women in the villages who have received formal education, and have communication and leadership skills. Gandhiji would also have endorsed the idea of women for this work, as he thought they were naturally assigned superior power and strength.

Initiatives such as Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health (RMNCH +A) programme and Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme are aimed at reducing IMR, MMR, and improving family planning rates, child and maternal nutrition. The Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), for providing insurance coverage to BPL families, has been increasingly subscribed to by the people. Despite various schemes, only less than 20 per cent of the population was covered by any form of health coverage making health expenses a major issue. Gandhiji may not have endorsed the idea of handing over healthcare to the private sector as it would have only further exacerbated the existing disparity of health-care access among people of different socio-economic strata.

The National Programme for Prevention and Control of Cancer, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Diseases and Stroke (NPCDCS) was implemented at the realization of the brunt of chronic non-communicable diseases and cancer in India. It has been focusing more on providing preventive and control measures, but implementing Gandhian ideas gives it an impetus in guiding the population through a healthy lifestyle.

The resilience of Gandhiji's mind and his unshakable faith in his beliefs has made him one of the greatest individuals to have walked in flesh and blood on this earth. His way of living is a guide for many of us to move towards a healthy life. But as he has taught us, health implies all aspects of life and not just physical health.

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Jawaharlal Nehru Essay for Students and Children

500+ words jawaharlal nehru essay.

Jawaharlal Nehru Essay- Jawaharlal Nehru is the name that every Indian is aware of. Jawaharlal was quite famous among children. Due to which the children called him ‘Chacha Nehru’. Since he loved children so much the government celebrated his birthday as ‘ Children’s Day ’. Jawaharlal Nehru was a great leader. He was a person of great love for the country.

Jaw aharlal Nehru’s Early Life

Jawaharlal Nehru was born on 14th November 1889 in Allahabad (now Prayagraj). His father’s name was Motilal Nehru who was a good lawyer. His father was very rich because of which Nehru got the best education.

At an early age, he was sent abroad for studies. He studied in two universities of England namely Harrow and Cambridge. He completed his degree in the year 1910.

Since Nehru was an average guy in his studies he was not much interested in law. He had an interest in politics. Though he later became a lawyer and practiced law in Allahabad High Court. At the age of 24, he got married to Smt. Kamla Devi. They gave birth to a daughter who was named Indira.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Jawaharlal Nehru as a Leader

Most Noteworthy, Jawaharlal Nehru was the first Prime Minister of India. He was a man of great vision. He was a leader, politician, and writer too. Since he always India to become a successful country he always worked day and night for the betterment of the country. Jawaharlal Nehru was a man of great vision. Most importantly he gave the slogan ‘Araam Haram Hai’.

Jawaharlal Nehru was a man of peace but he saw how Britishers treated Indians. Due to which he decided to join the freedom movement. He had a love for his country because of which he shook hands with Mahatma Gandhi (Bapu). As a result, he joined the Non-Cooperation movement of Mahatma Gandhi .

In his freedom struggle, he had to face many challenges. He even went to jail many times. However, his love for the country did not get any less. He fought a great fight which results in Independence. India got its’ Independence on 15th August 1947. Because of Jawaharlal Nehru’s efforts, he was elected as the first prime minister of India.

Achievements as a Prime Minister

Nehru was a man of modern thinking. He always wanted to make India a more modern and civilized country. There was a difference between the thinking of Gandhi and Nehru. Gandhi and Nehru had different attitudes toward civilization. While Gandhi wanted an ancient India Nehru was of modern India. He always wanted India to go in a forward direction. Despite the cultural and religious differences in India.

However, there was a pressure of religious freedom in the country. At that time the main motive was to unite the country. With all the pressures Jawaharlal Nehru led the country in scientific and modern efforts.

Most importantly Jawaharlal Nehru had a great achievement. He changed ancient Hindu cultural. It helped the Hindu widows a lot. The change had given women equal rights like men. The right of inheritance and property.

Though Nehru was great prime minister a problem stressed him a lot. The Kashmir region that was claimed by both India and Pakistan. He tried to settle the dispute several times but the problem was still there.

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• Writing a Winning Scholarship Essay to Study Abroad

How to write a winning scholarship essay to study abroad

Write a strong scholarships essay with these useful tips.

Studying abroad can be an enriching and life-changing experience, but it can also come with a little hassle. Fortunately, there are many scholarship opportunities available to students who wish to pursue their education overseas. However, with so many applicants vying for limited funds, it's important to stand out from the crowd. One way to do this is by writing a compelling scholarship essay that showcases your strengths, goals, and passion for your field of study. In this blog, we'll provide tips and strategies to help you craft a winning scholarship essay that can help fund your study abroad dreams.

Help me study abroad

What is the format for the scholarship essay to study abroad?

A standard format for scholarship essay s exists to guide applicants on what to include in their writing. The format can vary depending on the specific requirements of the organisation. However, there are some common elements that are typically included in such essays. Here's a suggested format you can follow:

Introduction: Begin with a captivating opening sentence or anecdote that grabs the reader's attention and introduces the main theme of your essay. Clearly state your purpose for applying for the scholarship and studying abroad.

Background and motivation: Provide background information about yourself, including your academic achievements, extracurricular activities, and any relevant experiences that have influenced your decision to study abroad. Explain your motivation for seeking this particular scholarship and why studying abroad is important to you.

Goals and aspirations: Clearly articulate your academic and personal goals related to studying abroad. Discuss how this opportunity aligns with your long-term ambitions and how it will contribute to your personal growth, cultural understanding, and future career prospects.

Fit with the program/country: Highlight why you have chosen the specific study abroad program and country. Discuss how the program's curriculum, faculty, resources, or location align with your academic interests and goals. Show your knowledge and understanding of the host country's culture, history, and language, and explain how immersing yourself in that environment will enhance your educational experience.

Financial need: If the scholarship is based on financial need, provide a concise explanation of your financial circumstances and how the scholarship would alleviate your financial burden, enabling you to pursue your studies abroad.

Conclusion: Summarise the main points of your essay and reiterate your enthusiasm and commitment to studying abroad. End with a strong closing statement that leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

Remember to make your essay to the specific scholarship requirements and word limit, and always proofread and revise your essay for clarity, coherence, and grammar before submitting it.

12 Tips to write a winning scholarship essay to study abroad

If you will follow these tips, you can craft a unique and compelling scholarship essay that effectively communicates your qualifications, aspirations, and the reasons why you are the ideal candidate for the scholarship. Here are some tips and strategies for you to consider when writing a scholarship essay to study abroad :

Follow the word limit: Know the essay's word limit to ensure you stay within the specified boundaries. This shows your ability to effectively communicate your ideas concisely.

Personalise your introduction: Instead of starting with a quote that takes up valuable space, begin your essay with a captivating introduction that showcases your unique profile and immediately grabs the reader's attention.

Strike a formal-yet-engaging tone: Maintain a formal tone throughout your essay while incorporating descriptive language that brings your experiences and aspirations to life. Strike a balance between professionalism and engaging storytelling.

Prepare with notes: Before starting your first draft, jot down key points, ideas, and anecdotes you wish to include in your essay. This preparation will help you organise your thoughts and ensure a focused and coherent essay.

Relevant achievements only: Avoid overcrowding your essay with extra achievements. Instead, selectively include accomplishments that are directly relevant to your chosen course of study and the nature of the scholarship.

Communicate clearly with appropriate vocabulary: Use clear and effective language to express your ideas. Avoid the temptation to include overly complex words solely for the sake of sounding more formal or knowledgeable. Communication is key.

Craft a concise conclusion: Keep your conclusion brief, yet impactful. Express gratitude for the opportunity and briefly reiterates your enthusiasm for the scholarship.

Research the scholarship provider: Take the time to research the scholarship provider and understand their goals and motivations. Make your essay reflect how your aspirations align with their mission, showing a genuine connection.

Be authentic, avoid overselling: While it's important to highlight your strengths, be authentic and avoid overselling yourself. Focus on presenting a well-rounded picture of who you are and the value you would bring as a scholarship recipient.

Understand the expectations: Thoroughly read and comprehend the scholarship statement to understand what the selection committee expects from you and your essay. Address their specific criteria and demonstrate your ability to meet their expectations.

Highlight the impact of the scholarship: Emphasise how receiving the scholarship will play a crucial role in achieving your dreams and goals. Showcase your gratitude and the ways in which the scholarship will make a significant difference in your educational journey.

Proofread attentively: Take the time to proofread your essay multiple times to catch any grammatical or spelling errors. Carefully review the content, structure, and flow of your essay to ensure a polished and error-free final draft.

Types of scholarships available to study abroad

There are different types of scholarships offered for students interested in studying abroad , and with careful strategic planning and thorough research, you can secure the most suitable one. Scholarships for international education generally fall into the following categories:

Indian government scholarships to study abroad

Here are some of the Indian government scholarships for Indian students to opt for when stepping out to make their dream of studying abroad come true:

Read more:    Fulbright-Nehru Master's Fellowships

By following these tips and strategies you can easily write a strong and effective scholarship when planning to pursue your further studies abroad. Also, you can get in touch with our international education experts at IDP to know more about studying abroad. They will help you with the admission procedure.

Talk to our international education experts

Updated on Aug 23, 2023

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