About
Most of India, most of the time
Life in India is a slow record of how most Indians live. It looks close up at people and reports, and keeps a long view of the parts of Indian life the news passes over. The people living those lives speak for themselves.
Why this exists
Most coverage follows whatever is loudest at the moment. The majority of the country enters the conversation for a day, when something terrible happens, and then leaves it. People on the margins, minorities, and communities still called “lower” by the rest of us rarely have their lives and hardships recorded at all.
Why are girls in one community in Madhya Pradesh expected to enter sex work, and celebrated at birth for it? Why is it so hard to walk in an Indian city, in a country where most people still get about on foot? Why do so many young Indians with degrees not find work, in one of the fastest-growing large economies in the world? These questions have answers, scattered across reports, court orders, research papers, films and the memories of the people involved. This project keeps them together.
What we publish
Close Up
Our own work, one person or one report at a time. Long conversations with people doing important work and thinking hard about it, released into the public domain. First-person accounts, recorded in the speaker’s language. Readings of reports and papers that are stuck in long PDFs, written with the consent of their authors and checked by them.
Long View
One subject, kept over time. A short account of where things stand, then dated entries: reporting, research, law, film, data and posts, most of it other people’s work, credited in full and linked first. Our own Close Up pieces on the subject are entries too, so a life and its context are one link apart.
A Long View is not a live article. It makes a smaller promise. It has an opening date, a last entry and a count. When nothing new turns up for four months it is marked dormant, and it stays online. If this project ever stops, what remains is a dated archive.
How the record is kept
- Credit comes first. Every reporter, researcher, photographer and filmmaker is named. The link to their work is the most prominent thing in the entry.
- Excerpts stay short. Under ninety words, quoted for review under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957, and never the heart of a paywalled story. Findings are given in our own words, with the page they are on. Judgments and Acts, and works out of copyright in India (sixty years after the author’s death), are quoted at more length; an openly licensed text names its licence. What you may reuse.
- Every link is archived the day it enters a Long View, so the record survives when the original page does not.
- Nothing changes silently. Each Long View ends with a log of what was added and when. Every revision of “Where things stand” is kept, with the words that changed marked. A published entry cannot be edited without a correction that says so.
- No money changes hands. Life in India is one person’s unpaid work. Nobody is paid to speak, and nobody pays to appear.
- Conversations belong to everyone. With each guest’s agreement, the conversation is released into the public domain (CC0): anyone may read it, republish it, translate it or build on it, for anything. What you may reuse.
- Consent is recorded, and anyone can ask us to take their account down. We will.
- Every account is read back to the speaker before publication. They can remove things. They cannot be made to add them.
- Partners advise on safety, not on text. When an organisation introduces us to someone, it is named on the piece.
- No minors, and no identifiable faces, where exposure could cause harm. Some Long Views carry no photographs at all, by design.
- Whole people. We ask about work and hardship, and also about children, food, cricket and Sundays.
Languages
Every story is titled first in the language it was lived in, and English follows as the translation. Original-language lines are checked by native speakers before they appear. The pages are set in Anek, a type family by EK Type in Mumbai drawn across Latin and ten Indian scripts, so Tamil, Hindi and English can sit together as equals.
Who makes it
I’m Bhuvanesh, and I make Life in India on my own, alongside a full-time job. For Close Up I write to people doing some of the most important work in the country, and thinking and writing about it, and ask if they will talk. Interpreters and partner organisations, when they help, are named on every page they help make.
I pay for it myself. There is no advertising and there are no sponsored stories. If that ever changes, this page will say so before anything else does.
Large language models help with almost all of it, and I’d rather say so plainly. The AI disclosure says why, what they do here, and the rules they work under.
The cousins
Life in India has a close cousin, This Indian Life, which follows the same country through its data: sourced charts and plain-language explainers on health, money, the economy and the rest. This site keeps the record in people’s words and the reporting around them; that one keeps it in numbers. Hope and Despair points the same instinct at the whole planet.
A few other things I tinker with: Akshara, which digitizes public-domain Indian books; Paper Lanterns; Poetic Reveries; Seneca; Small Web; Tipsheet; and Rabbit Holes. I write essays on my Substack.
Write to us
- Suggest a source
- Use the form at the end of any Long View.
- Corrections
- Every correction is logged, with the date and what changed.
- bhuvan@bebhuvan.com
- Elsewhere
- X, @bebhuvan · LinkedIn · Substack
- For machines
- llms.txt, llms-full.txt, and a Markdown and JSON copy of every Long View