INDIA

A Walk in Calcutta
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
A return home to the chaotic streets of this sprawling Indian city becomes a time-shifting journey between the past and the present for one writer.
May 3, 2009 | TRAVEL | NEWS

Inside Gate, India’s Good Life; Outside, the Servants’ Slums
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
When the scorch of summer hit this north Indian boomtown, and the municipal water supply worked only a few hours each day, inside a high-rise tower called Hamilton Court, Jaya Chand could turn on her kitchen tap around the clock, and water would gush out.
June 9, 2008 | WORLD | ASIA PACIFIC

Crusader Sees Wealth as Cure for Caste Bias
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
When Chandra Bhan Prasad visits his ancestral village in these feudal badlands of northern India, he dispenses the following advice to his fellow untouchables: Get rid of your cattle, because the care of animals demands children’s labor. Invest in your children’s education instead of in jewelry or land. Cities are good for Dalit outcastes like us, and so is India’s new capitalism.
August 29, 2008 | WORLD | ASIA PACIFIC

IRAQ

For Iraqi Girls, Changing Land Narrows Lives
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
In an air-conditioned bedroom with pink everything on the walls, Yosor Ali al-Qatan, 15, stares longingly at a hip-hugging pair of pink pinstriped pants. The new Iraq, her mother warns her, is far too dangerous for a 15-year-old girl to be seen in such pants.
June 27, 2004 | WORLD | THE REACH OF WAR: THE OCCUPATION

Finding a Path Back to Iraq, and Toward Securing Women's Freedom
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Yanar Mohammed runs a secret network of safe houses in her native Iraq. The women who come through its doors are honor-killing runaways, rape survivors, war widows and assorted others who have been to the cliff edge of hell and back.
November 27, 2015 | MIDDLE EAST

DARFUR

Sudan Government's Attacks Stoke Rebels' Fury
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Three skinny urchins, covered in sand from head to toe, arrived here at a base camp of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army the other day. They said they had run away from home -- a tent in a refugee camp across the border in Chad -- and walked three days across the desert, one bottle of water between them and no food. They said their villages had been destroyed. They were 11 to 13 years old. They now had one ambition: to join the rebels.
September 11, 2004 | AFRICA

CONGO

Innocence of Youth Is Victim of Congo War
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
As militia groups battle for control of this provincial town in Congo's northeast, Bunia's young are paying a high price. The war has shuttered their schools, left them lame and hungry, killed their parents before their eyes. It has turned children into merciless killers and haunted them with memories of mayhem unfitting for the most hard-bitten grown-ups. Girls have been raped, toddlers have been butchered, babies left crying among dead bodies.
June 23, 2003 | AFRICA

LIBERIA

The Haves and Have-Nots Reside On Both Sides of Liberian Capital
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Rebel-held Monrovia's only hospital is inside a brewery. Its operating table is a long wooden desk. The surgeon, who cleans shrapnel wounds, extracts bullets and ties up intestines punctured by gunshots, is a nurse who used to work at a maternity clinic. This afternoon, a patient with a fist-sized wound in his arm was howling in pain. The hospital is almost out of painkillers, as well as medications for its 50 cholera patients.
August 6, 2003 | AFRICA

Enraged Liberians Call for U.S. Help as Rebels Attack
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
United States marines arrived by helicopter this morning to protect the American Embassy and help evacuate foreigners from the capital as it fell under the heaviest shelling to date. Hundreds of enraged Liberians, in a desperate offering before the country they call their "big brother," laid the mutilated bodies of their loved ones by the embassy's shuttered black steel gate.
July 22, 2003 | AFRICA