Sanam and Kavita: Iran War, India Gen Z Uprising and the Joy of New Life

Sanam and Kavita close Season 3 the way they opened it, in conversation with each other, just the two of them, freewheeling before the summer break.

They begin with the best news of the season. Kavita is a grandmother. Parker arrived during the World Cup final, and the joy of it opens onto something harder: that every woman who brings a new life into the world puts her own life at risk.

From there the conversation turns to India, where a generation of medical students has mobilised after being called cockroaches by a figure at the top of the establishment. A Dalit student studying abroad posted a meme in reply, "if we are the cockroaches, may we be millions of cockroaches together", and it went viral. The education minister has been forced to resign, something Kavita points out has not happened once in ten years of Narendra Modi's government, not even during the farmers' protests.

Sanam and Kavita trace the same current through the students who protested over Gaza, through Iran's Women Life Freedom movement, and through American public opinion, where two contradictory bills now move through Congress at the same time. They talk about Iran with real grief: a people who were nonviolently trying to change their own country, then bombed by the powers claiming to help them.

The hardest section is on how war is now fought. Sanam explains that a thousand targets a day for thirty days is only possible when the assessment is automated, and returns to a 2021 strike in Afghanistan where the algorithm identified white cars but was never programmed to identify children. When engineers offered to fix it, the Pentagon said there was no need.

They end on power and who holds it. Sanam on Resolution 1325, on the League of Nations women who first asked for a seat, and on how the table keeps moving to another room. Kavita on Julia Ward Howe, whose original Mother's Day proclamation was a call to disarm.

They sign off on gratitude: for a season of guests, for a friendship that began at the Robert Bosch Academy, and for the reminder that in a world constantly besieged by news of what is going wrong, most people are decent and most people are trying. As June Jordan put it, we are the ones we have been waiting for.

Back in September with a new line up!

Chapters

00:00 Cold open

00:35 Welcome — the last episode of the season

01:06 Kavita becomes a grandmother