In the backdrop of Karnataka witnessing reactionary ‘saffron-shawl’ protests, Samhitha S Shetty, a student at Mahatma Gandhi Memorial College Udupi, who does pooja every morning, speaks to The Quint about why she stands with her Muslim friends and their right to wear the Hijab.
Shetty asserts, “The students who are protesting against hijab started wearing the kesari shawls only recently, from just a few days ago. The Muslim students, including my Muslim friends, have been wearing the hijab since several years.”

Meanwhile, Krishna Prasad examines the state in the midst of the controversy and traces Karnataka’s history as an early-stage investor in Hindutva.
“The Bharatiya Janata Party’s political quest for the Babri Masjid only began in the late 1980s. In Karnataka, the ground to reclaim Baba Budangiri, a Sufi shrine in Chikmagalur district, had been laid a decade before Ayodhya became common parlance, in 1978,” writes Prasad.

Across the globe, international students, many of them hailing from Punjab, have been protesting against the abrupt closure of three universities in Quebec, Canada, which has left them uncertain about their degrees and fees.
The Quint’s Saptarshi Basak speaks to students who are at the helm of organising these protests, and demanding justice from the authorities.

“We were absolutely certain that we didn’t want to make a film on air pollution. We were interested in working on the relationship between the skies and the non-human life in Delhi, and its relationship with two human protagonists,” says Shaunak Sen, whose film All That Breathes won the Grand Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival 2022.
Watch Sen’s interview with The Quint here.

Lastly, an upcoming film 'Badhaai Do' portrays a marriage of convenience between a gay policeman and lesbian teacher, exploring what the LGBTQIA+ community calls a 'lavender marriage’.
Speaking to The Quint, members of the queer community reflect on this "compromised reality" while asserting that those who enter such marriages do so because they have "no other choice.”