This week on Hafta, Abhinandan Sekhri, Manisha Pande, and Anand Vardhan discuss Sonia Gandhi’s memoir Belonging: A Journey of Love and the ongoing debate over festivals, firecrackers, and pollution. Joining them are Sobhana K Nair, senior deputy editor at The Hindu, and energy and environmental policy researcher Karthik Ganesan. 

The discussion begins with Sonia Gandhi’s memoir. Sobhana calls it “very well-written” with “sparkling prose”. 

She says the book is surprisingly personal, with little politics in its first 200 pages and much more about Sonia’s childhood, her father, her time in Cambridge and her relationship with Indira Gandhi.

“It humanises her,” Sobhana says, arguing that the memoir gives readers a glimpse of Sonia Gandhi beyond the distant political figure they have known for decades.

Manisha says the book is particularly interesting because Sonia Gandhi has rarely spoken publicly about her own life. “There are so few interviews that she’s given or so few conversations that she’s had about herself, that it is definitely a fascinating life that you’d want to get to know,” she says.

The panel also looks at the controversy over Sonia’s account of the Emergency, Operation Blue Star and the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. 

Anand questions how much honesty readers can expect from a political memoir. He argues that the book appears to have been ghostwritten and says political leaders have little incentive to reveal anything that could hurt their political interests.

He cites George Orwell’s famous standard for autobiographies: “An autobiography has not to be trusted if it does not reveal something disgraceful about you.”

Sobhana takes a different view, arguing that readers should understand an autobiography as one person’s perception of events. “Truth according to who?” she asks. She says the facts may not change, but how people experience and remember them can.

The second half of the episode turns to festivals, public spaces and pollution, with the debate coming against the backdrop of Diwali and Chhath Puja. Karthik joins the panel to discuss the tension between religious and cultural traditions and environmental concerns. 

Abhinandan frames the issue as a balancing act between “festivals and traditions versus civic sense, environmental damage, and just basic inconvenience”.

Karthik points to the difficulty of treating pollution as the result of any single source or activity. He argues that the conversation needs to move beyond the annual focus on Diwali and look at the wider set of emissions and policy failures that contribute to Delhi’s air pollution.

Anand argues that the conflict is not simply about pollution but also about who gets to use public spaces and how. He says festivals can be among the few occasions when ordinary people feel they can freely occupy and express themselves in public spaces.

“The way public space, the upper strata of society or elite, look at the public space, and how the underclass looks at the public space is very different,” Anand says, describing this as “bourgeois environmentalism” or “elite environmentalism”.

The panel also discusses whether festivals can evolve without losing their cultural significance. Manisha suggests community-level celebrations and organised fireworks as one way to preserve the festive experience while reducing the impact on air quality.

Anand argues that firecrackers themselves are a relatively modern expression of festivity and that cultural practices can change—but not quickly. “Making people shift from crackers can work in a city or two, but not at all-India level very soon. Maybe in 40, 50 years,” he says.

All this and more.