THE WEEK magazine features Sonam Wangchuk again, alongside analyses of Gen Z's electoral impact amidst anti-paper leak protests, and reports on alleged Chinese energy weapon deployment in Arunachal Pradesh, while also exploring historical contexts and cultural narratives.

THE WEEK magazine features Sonam Wangchuk again, alongside analyses of Gen Z's electoral impact amidst anti-paper leak protests, and reports on alleged Chinese energy weapon deployment in Arunachal Pradesh, while also exploring historical contexts and cultural narratives.

THE WEEK magazine features Sonam Wangchuk again, alongside analyses of Gen Z's electoral impact amidst anti-paper leak protests, and reports on alleged Chinese energy weapon deployment in Arunachal Pradesh, while also exploring historical contexts and cultural narratives.

WHEN CHANDIGARH CORRESPONDENT Vijaya Pushkarna suggested Sonam Wangchuk as THE WEEK’s Man of the Year 2001, Three Idiots and Phunsukh Wangdu were eight years away. But we agreed, as Vijaya’s nose for news had served the magazine well in Chandigarh. She retired as deputy chief of our Delhi bureau in 2019.​

We ran the Man of the Year feature dated December 23, 2001, and it was an unforgettable issue in more ways than one. That was one of the few issues where the face of the Man of the Year was not the main image on cover. Wangchuk was reduced to a cover mention, a strip on the very top of the cover, right above the masthead. We compensated with a 10-page article inside.

Why didn’t we put Wangchuk prominently on cover? It had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the terror attack that hit Parliament on December 13, 2001. The cover heading read ‘Terror comes to Parliament’, with the main article being written by correspondent Debashish Mukerji.

The cover bylines inside would be familiar names to old friends of THE WEEK—Nistula Hebbar, K. Sunil Thomas, Prerna Singh Bindra, Neeru Bhatia, Tariq Ahmad Bhat, Kartikeya Sharma, Quaied Najmi and Rashmi Saksena. Sunil is now senior assistant editor in Delhi, and we lost Tariq to a heart attack while he was our senior special correspondent in Srinagar. The others continue to be big names in journalism and academia.

This week, Wangchuk is back on cover, as the man of the week that passed. Chief of Bureau (Delhi) Namrata Biji Ahuja interviewed him, and then wrote the main article with Senior Correspondent Shubhangi Shah. Wangchuk told THE WEEK: “I’m happy that there is still a connect between sadak (the street) and sansad (Parliament).”

Senior Assistant Editor Pratul Sharma and Correspondent Badar Bashir look at the anti-paper-leak protests from the opposition lens. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, India’s total vote count stood at 64.64 crore, they say. India’s Gen Z population, those born between 1997 and 2012, is at around 40 crore. What does that mean for political parties, especially the opposition, which is trying to break the BJP’s stranglehold on electoral politics.

A Gen Z face that was most prominent during the protests writes for us in this issue—Neha Bora, president of the All India Students’ Association (AISA). On the sidelines of the protest, Senior Special Correspondent Kanu Sarda spoke to Cockroach Janta Party spokesperson Ratna Singh, who ruled out the group’s immediate foray into electoral politics.

As always, THE WEEK’s offering is a bouquet and we endeavour to cover this vast nation of ours. Senior Assistant Editor Sanjib Kr Baruah writes about a top-secret report that hints that the Chinese deployed energy weapons against the Indian Army at least in Yangtse, Arunachal Pradesh.

Chief of Bureau (Chennai) Lakshmi Subramanian travelled to Ettayapuram near Thoothukudi to explore how the name of the king, Ettappan, came to be tainted by fiction.

New Media Coordinator Sarath Ramesh Kuniyl wonders whether Vaibhav Sooryavanshi should be allowed to be a single-format sensation or be guided into becoming a cross-format batter.

And, in @leisure, Deputy News Editor Navin J. Antony reviews former chief election commissioner S.Y. Quraishi’s book, which the writer insists is “a hundred memories and not a memoir”. Quraishi and I were batchmates in St Stephen’s College, and his predecessor in office was our senior, Navin Chawla.

Despite a friendship spanning almost half a century, it took Navin Antony’s article and a V.S. Naipaul quote to inform me that the Quraishis have lived in Delhi for over 500 years. “What in Europe would have sounded like boasting,” Naipaul wrote, “wasn’t boasting in India.” No, it is not. It is just the way we place ourselves in context, as the kids did in Jantar Mantar and in every other protest venue across India.

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