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Naina Bajekal
Bajekal is an Executive Editor at TIME.
Recent Articles
Fighting for a Future Free of Nuclear Weapons
Beatrice Fihn, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, on why she's optimistic about the prospect of nuclear disarmament
By Naina Bajekal
January 4, 2023
Inside the Growing Movement to Do More Good
Effective altruists believe we should care about people thousands of miles away—and perhaps even millions of years in the future.
By Naina Bajekal/Oxford, U.K.
August 10, 2022
Inside the Mind of Ursula von der Leyen
President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen is determined to lead the E.U. through yet another crisis.
By Naina Bajekal/Davos, Switzerland
June 9, 2022
Exclusive: Chancellor Olaf Scholz on a New Era for Germany
After decades of embracing pacifism to atone for two world wars, Germany now stands to emerge as a true global power—with a military to match
By Lisa Abend and Naina Bajekal/Berlin
April 27, 2022
How We Chose the 2022 Women of the Year
The list highlights 12 extraordinary leaders working for a more equal world
By Naina Bajekal and Lucy Feldman
March 3, 2022
Journalists Reflect on Covering Stories About Their Communities
Longstanding journalistic maxims would have a reporter remain disengaged while gathering the facts. But pursuing the whole truth means considering the humanity of one’s subjects—and of oneself. Lived experience can help a reporter empathize and...
By Jasmine Aguilera , Jenna Caldwell , Josiah Bates , Nadia Suleman , Naina Bajekal , Paulina Cachero , Sanya Mansoor and Suyin Haynes
May 13, 2021
How India’s COVID-19 Crisis Spiraled Out of Control
The country is now facing the world’s worst COVID-19 outbreak, and a devastating humanitarian crisis
By Naina Bajekal
April 28, 2021
Women Are Transforming What Climate Leadership Looks Like
The COVID-19 pandemic, like the climate crisis, is amplifying existing racial and gender injustices in our society. TIME editors Naina Bajekal and Elijah Wolfson moderated a conversation with two women working to create a more...
By Naina Bajekal and Elijah Wolfson
April 20, 2021
A Reading List to Celebrate Asian Authors
See a curated reading list from members of TIME's Asian community that celebrates Asian authors
By Naina Bajekal , Paulina Cachero , Andrew R. Chow , Suyin Haynes , Cady Lang and Karena Phan
March 24, 2021
A Defiant New Take on Contemporary India
“Writers and politicians are natural rivals,” Salman Rushdie wrote in his 1982 essay “Imaginary Homelands.” “Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. And the novel...
By Naina Bajekal
May 20, 2020
'Brits Are Notoriously Prudish.' On Set With the Cast of Netflix's
Sex Education
Squeals and laughter ring out across the set of Sex Education. It's Gillian Anderson's last day of filming for Season 2, and Ncuti Gatwa--who plays the show's ebullient teen Eric Effiong--has just discovered Anderson has...
By Naina Bajekal
January 16, 2020
Zora Neale Hurston's Short Stories Finally Get Their Due in a New Posthumous Collection
"Folklore," Zora Neale Hurston wrote in an essay, "is the boiled-down juice of human living." It was this deep interest in the lives and stories of the black community that led Hurston, who grew up...
By Naina Bajekal
January 16, 2020
She Was Misdiagnosed With Bipolar Disorder. Now She's Probing the Gaps in Our Understanding of Mental Illness
"If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?" So begins a landmark 1973 study by Stanford psychology professor David Rosenhan, who persuaded eight healthy people to feign hallucinations and commit themselves to mental...
By Naina Bajekal
November 7, 2019
India Is Starting to Lift Kashmir Restrictions. What Happens Next?
Over two months since the repeal of Kashmir's special status, citizens are bracing themselves for what's next
By Naina Bajekal
October 23, 2019
A Newly Translated Novel Charts the Dizzying Transformation of an Independent Oman
"When we are away from home, in new and strange places, we get to know ourselves better," Abdallah, the son of a rich merchant, thinks as he gazes out an airplane window. It's a sentiment...
By Naina Bajekal
October 10, 2019
A New Novel Sees Beyond the Abstraction of Today's Refugee Stories
After two summers volunteering in a refugee center in Athens as thousands of families flooded into Greece, Christy Lefteri found herself wondering what it means to see, and be seen. From the question sprang her...
By Naina Bajekal
August 22, 2019
India Has Taken Kashmir, But Winning the Hearts and Minds of Kashmiris Will be Harder
On the sunny, cloudless morning when Imaad Tariq was born in Kashmir, most of his family had no idea. "Nobody knows that my wife delivered a baby boy," says Tariq Ahmad Sheikh, at the hospital...
By Naina Bajekal
August 8, 2019
An Intimate Portrait of Life in Sierra Leone
Dignity, celebration, respect, joy. These were just some of the feelings photographer Robbie Lawrence wanted to capture in his work from Sierra Leone — a departure from the emotions we might traditionally associate with photography...
By Naina Bajekal
June 10, 2019
The Other Americans
Asks What It Means to Be an Immigrant in 2019
When Laila Lalami's 2014 novel The Moor's Account was short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize, jurors called its tale of a 16th century Spanish expedition to Florida "compassionately imagined out of the gaps and silences of...
By Naina Bajekal
March 14, 2019
How This Ethiopian Photographer Is Giving Storytellers a New Platform
When TIME approached photographer Aida Muluneh to create images for the 2019 Optimists issue, she immediately turned to Ethiopia’s political climate for inspiration. A new Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, had assumed office in April 2018...
By Naina Bajekal
February 7, 2019
How Artists of All Ages Keep Their Creative Spirit Alive
How does an artist keep her creative vision alive? It’s a concern not just for painters and poets who have been at work for decades; an artist’s vision can be tested at any point in...
By Naina Bajekal
February 7, 2019
Why Women Travel to Denmark for Fertility Treatments
At StorkKlinik in Copenhagen, half the patients are single women and lesbian couples
By Naina Bajekal/Copenhagen
January 3, 2019
How Traumatized Children See the World, According to Their Drawings
In May, now-ousted U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the start of the Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy to separate migrant families at the Mexican border. “If you are smuggling a child" into the country,...
By Naina Bajekal
November 14, 2018
The Personal Gets Political in the Masterful New Novel
All the Lives We Never Lived
Partway through Anuradha Roy's All the Lives We Never Lived, the German artist Walter Spies makes the case for simply enjoying life in India amid the global upheaval of the 1930s. "We are oceans away...
By Naina Bajekal
November 8, 2018
Want to Win the War on Drugs? Portugal Might Have the Answer
When Gonçalo Fonseca was a child, he went to school near Casal Ventoso, a Lisbon neighborhood that also served as the biggest open-air drugs market in Europe. “I have the vivid memory of being a...
By Naina Bajekal
August 1, 2018
Why
Love Island
Is the Defining Show of Summer 2018
"Love Island has completely taken over my life and I’m OK with it."
By Naina Bajekal/London
July 31, 2018
Meet 4 Crusaders Who Are Keeping the Dream of Democracy Alive
Around the world today, one in three people lives under an authoritarian regime, while many others are experiencing a decline in their democratic freedoms. But the slide towards autocracy has pushed millions to stand up...
By Vivienne Walt , Naina Bajekal , Billy Perrigo and Ciara Nugent
July 12, 2018
Andre Agassi Says These Are the Tennis Players to Watch
American tennis players could soon dominate the game like he and Sampras did
By Naina Bajekal/Paris
June 12, 2018
Andre Agassi's Next Chapter
Speaking to TIME at the French Open, the tennis legend says his sporting accomplishments don't compare with what he’s done since.
By Naina Bajekal/Paris
June 11, 2018
After Paris, Life For Refugees in France Has Gotten Even Harder
It had been one of the warmest Novembers on record, and for a while, the estimated 6,000 migrants and refugees in the French port city of Calais almost counted themselves lucky. That luck didn’t last:...
By Naina Bajekal/Calais
December 3, 2015
France's 'Generation Bataclan' Hasn't Lost Its
Joie de Vivre
Younger millennials in Paris feel under attack like never before — but their spirit endures
By Naina Bajekal / Paris
November 20, 2015
Muslims in Paris Suburbs Fear a Backlash
Residents of the
banlieues
tell TIME of their frustration, fear and anger
By Naina Bajekal / Paris
November 16, 2015
'France Is a Catastrophe': Life in a City Gone Still
A TIME reporter caught near the ISIS terror attacks on how Paris is struggling to cope
By Naina Bajekal / Paris
November 14, 2015
Global Foods You Can't Eat In the U.S.
Scotland's rural-affairs secretary Richard Lochhead visited the U.S. this week to lobby the federal government to overturn a decades-long import ban on haggis, a Scottish delicacy made of sheep's innards, oats and suet traditionally cooked...
By Naina Bajekal
November 12, 2015
Clowns Turned Politicians
Satirist Jimmy Morales was elected President of Guatemala on Oct. 25 on an anticorruption platform, despite having no experience in politics. He's far from the first joker to actually get ahead in government.
By Naina Bajekal
October 29, 2015
What Happens When Drugs Aren't Illegal?
A leaked U.N. report recommending that countries decriminalize narcotics for personal use brought the war on drugs into the global spotlight, even though it was later shelved. Countries that have loosened drug restrictions can boast some successes.
By Naina Bajekal
October 22, 2015
Why the E.U. Is Offering Turkey Billions to Deal With Refugees
Overwhelmed by the number of migrants at their door, Angela Merkel and other European leaders are looking to Turkey to control the flow
By Naina Bajekal
October 19, 2015
The Perils Pulling Turkey Apart
A deadly summer of political violence in Turkey culminated in the country's worst-ever terrorist attack on Oct. 10 when twin bombings at a peace rally in Ankara killed at least 97 people, mainly Kurdish demonstrators....
By Naina Bajekal
October 15, 2015
How the Arab Spring and Civil Wars Led to Europe’s Refugee Crisis
Migrants have been plotting their escape
By Naina Bajekal
October 8, 2015
Germans Open Their Homes to Refugees
The country is offering open arms to migrants
By Naina Bajekal/Berlin
October 8, 2015
The War on Plastic Bags
The U.K. introduced a controversial 5-pence ($0.08) tax Oct. 5 on every plastic bag, joining other places where lawmakers have tried to curb the use of the nonbiodegradable polyethylene bags: DENMARK Introduced a tax as...
By Naina Bajekal
October 8, 2015
What Will the Trans-Pacific Partnership Do?
After five years of grueling negotiations, the U.S. and 11 other Pacific Rim countries reached a historic agreement on Oct. 5 on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade accord covering some two-fifths of the world...
By Naina Bajekal
October 8, 2015
Can Saudi Arabia Make the Hajj Safer?
More than 1,000 people died during this year's holy rituals in Mecca, putting new pressure on Saudi Arabia to tackle a growing number of challenges. OVERCROWDING In 2008, Saudi authorities began a three-decade, $227 billion...
By Naina Bajekal
October 1, 2015
Germany's Refugee Crisis Won't Stop Beer Festival
The biggest beer festival in the world gets underway in Munch—with refugees kept out of the way
By Naina Bajekal / Munich
September 28, 2015
Great 20th Century Migrations
With an estimated 1 in every 122 people on earth now displaced according to the U.N., there are currently more people fleeing violence or persecution than at any other time since World War II. Here's how the world dealt with previous mass movements of people.
By Naina Bajekal
September 17, 2015
Australia's Game of Thrones
In a leadership ballot on Sept. 14, Malcolm Turnbull toppled Tony Abbott to become leader of the conservative Liberal Party and the country's fourth Prime Minister in two years, cementing Canberra's reputation as the coup...
By Naina Bajekal
September 17, 2015
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