WRITING ACROSS LANGUAGES & IDEAS.

Englandar Chitthi — Letters from England

Englandar Chitthi began without any plan to become a book. I wrote the letters month after month for Bara Othara, the Assamese youth magazine I founded and edited, as a conversation with young readers about the world unfolding around them.

Written between 2014 and 2025, the letters span more than a decade and range across science, politics, education, philosophy, technology, culture and world events. The publisher describes the collection as an effort to foster critical thinking and moral imagination among young readers, written from both England and Assam and viewing contemporary events through compassion and conscience.

Their form is deliberately personal. Rather than presenting lessons, each letter usually begins with something happening in the world—a discovery, controversy, public event or human story—and gradually turns toward reflection. The original intention was never to tell young readers what to think, but to invite them to think alongside the writer.

Seen together years later, the letters have acquired another character. They have become a record of time itself: a generation growing up while the world moved through political upheavals, technological transformation, pandemic, scientific advances and changing moral vocabularies. The volume describes this accumulation as a continuing conversation in which individual letters remain self-contained but together form a larger intellectual journey.

Perhaps that is what I value most about the collection. It preserves an experiment in taking young people seriously—not merely as future adults to be instructed, but as thinking persons already entitled to participate in the great conversation about the world they will inherit.