Sitting amid the blackened remains of his home, 32-year-old Nikesh Gawali carefully broke open a half-melted plastic box with a screwdriver. His hands shook slightly, not out of fear, but out of hope. “I’m trying to find my daughter Aarti’s gold earrings,” he said quietly, still focused on the box. “She’s just five. I got them made recently after months of labour work.” The plastic box, warped and blackened by heat, was one of the few things left from his two-room house on the outskirts of Dhamangaon village . All around him lay ash, broken tin sheets and charred wooden beams. The walls had cracked under the heat and the front room’s tin roof had caved in completely. What remained was a blackened debris all around - almost nothing to suggest a home once stood there. Nikesh earns his living as an agricultural labourer, like many in the village. Work is uncertain and depends on the season. Those earrings weren’t just jewellery - they were a small dream, a reward for his hard work,...
INTERVIEW By Dheeraj Fartode Sense of pride of his 17-month tenure as Commissioner of Police is visible in the eyes of Shardaprasad Yadav when he says, “I have changed perception in people’s mind that police cannot not ‘touch’ criminals. This change in perception has led us to win the confidence of citizens and establish police-people connect.” This observation of the city’s top cop who is nearing the end of his tenure and is about to proceed on promotion to Mumbai, makes an altogether different sense in Nagpur’s special context. There were times when the city enjoyed a dubious distinction that top cops did not want to have even short tenures here, and perhaps for justifiable reasons, as some of them used to state. In the case of Shardaprasad Yadav, things have been altogether different. Despite his absence from the posting for personal reasons for s...