COVER STORY
What’s next for the cockroaches?
Just when the Narendra Modi government seemed invincible, its muscular presence casting an imperious shadow across the country, young people taking over the streets at the call of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) showed how things could be different. The open season for defiance began on June 6 with a
read more...
THE WATER GURU
ANUPAM Mishra is back from Barmer in Rajasthan full of news. There has been a downpour in the desert. Towns are under water. Railway stations have been decimated. An Air Force strip has been submerged. These are the headlines all over, but they are not Anupam’s news. He has found
read more...
Uprising in Delhi
A 49-day student agitation which galvanized India with its call for education reforms and shook the Narendra Modi government came to an end on July 25 with the government conceding the demands made by the students. The education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, was compelled to resign over the repeated leaking out
read more...
Call of the Cockroach
BEGINNING on June 6 in the blistering afternoon heat of Delhi, a series of protests over the education system have been held in cities across India under the banner of the internet-born Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). The protests have drawn modest numbers of a few thousand each time, but they
read more...
Putting trees on the map
For the past two years, Uday Krishna Peddireddi has been getting behind the wheel of his Isuzu V-Cross pick-up and going in search of ancient trees that should be saved. He has identified 150 rare trees and placed them on a digital map of India so that they can be
read more...
When there are angels on the road
Most days of the week the Banaswadi intersection is clogged with dense traffic. Cars, buses and three-wheelers arrive in a torrent as they make their way to residential areas, a software park and the airport on Bengaluru’s northeastern fringes. During rush hour an unnavigable mess prevails. On one such extremely
read more...
TB time bomb: A survivor tells his story
I was training to be a doctor when I started feeling sick. After two weeks of continued fever, cough and immense weight loss, we decided to go for an X-ray and found I had fluid in my left lung. The doctor told me that it was tuberculosis. I was started
read more...
When a great mango looks for a market
IN 2021, as the world struggled to shake off the Covid-19 pandemic, Kuttiattoor, a quiet village in Kerala, found itself basking in glory it hadn’t entirely anticipated. An eponymous mango which Kuttiattoor had been lazily growing for the longest time had earned the village a Geographical Indicator (GI) tag. For
read more...
A brand gets built in rural Bengal
TANTIPARA is a small village in West Bengal, a few hours by train from Kolkata. Chances are you won’t ever be headed in its direction. But if you happen to come across skillfully woven and printed silk products under the name of Oikko in your city, remember they come from
read more...
Can the Yamuna be revived?
The Yamuna is one of India’s most sacred rivers. But on its 22-km stretch through Delhi, the Yamuna gets reduced to being a polluted drain. Four decades of efforts to restore the river have mostly ended in failure. Delhi, one of India’s richest cities, does to the Yamuna what Indian
read more...
Baolis tumble out of Hyderabad’s past
FAR removed from its gleaming software parks and ambitious companies, a brooding necropolis on Hyderabad’s periphery is a reminder of a different kind of power and glory in an era long gone by. Rulers of the Qutb Shahi dynasty, who once took the Golconda Sultanate to great heights of globalized
read more...
Can Lucknow get back its rivers and lakes?
THE city of Lucknow is planning a revival of its water heritage. If the effort succeeds at least one shrunken river with wetlands, lakes and rivulets could gradually spring back to life over time. Originally, the city depended on waterbodies for its survival. Thoughtless urbanization then tore this harmonious equation
read more...
What is India’s AI future?
The abbreviation for artificial intelligence, AI, is now as commonly used as TV. And like television, artificial intelligence has permeated everyday life. It became even more ubiquitous when the AI Impact Summit was held in Delhi in February. A media barrage amplified AI’s visibility for the government-led event which heads
read more...
Seeking teachers
THE Supreme Court recently annulled 25,000 appointments to government-run schools in West Bengal, upholding charges that there had been cheating in a selection examination and that bribes had also been paid for appointments. Of those whose jobs were gone, 17,000 were teachers who had been in service for 10 years
read more...
School and festival
If you happen to be in the Usmanpura locality of Ahmedabad as evening sets in, chances are you will hear classical music emanating from an ordinary-looking school building in the area. It has been so on most days for 46 long years as accomplished musicians nurture new talent in a
read more...
Great quest: The inclusive innovation
We’re living in unprecedented times. Some might call it an age of uncertainty — of wars, trade disruptions, climate volatility, and social unrest. But we belong among the believers. For us this is, in fact, the best era to be alive. We see humanity standing more empowered than ever before.
read more...
Breakout films make it big
At the 77th Cannes Film Festival in 2024, Indian cinema ended a 30-year jinx. Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light broke into the Competition line-up, becoming the first film from India to do so since Shaji N. Karun’s 1994 Malayalam-language Swaham. Kapadia was the first Indian woman
read more...
Master of the museum piece
Far away from casinos, beaches and other touristy attractions, three homegrown museums, nestling in paddy fields on an organic farm, document the history of Goa going back several generations, recreating what life used to be like in this beautiful coastal paradise. The Goa Chitra Museums in Benaulim in South Goa
read more...
Punjab’s addiction anguish
The following is an edited extract from ‘Most of What You Know About Addiction is Wrong’ by Anirudh Kala, published by Speaking Tiger IT is a myth that the people of Punjab have latched on to drugs only in recent years from previously having been ascetically abstinent. An Indian publication
read more...
Fund someone’s reading glasses
It is comforting to end the year by giving. Yet, even as you get your debit card out, choosing a beneficiary can be a challenge. Putting money where it works well for someone is invariably a complicated call. But it is possible with just one modest donation, well directed, to
read more...
Blessed is the rural hospital
It’s a dreary morning in May. The news from all over the country is of deaths, cremations and patients trying to find beds in hospitals. In sharp contrast, at Chinchpada, a small village in Maharashtra, a thanksgiving is being held. The occasion is the installation of an oxygen plant at
read more...
The next pandemic?
Masarhi is a village in Bihar so steeped in grinding poverty that its people are known to hunt rats in their fields and eat them. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, however, these hapless people with so little have what many residents in cities don’t — an easily accessible
read more...
Doctors out there
In 1992 a young couple, both doctors, travelled from Madurai in Tamil Nadu to a remote corner of Assam to check out the Makunda Christian Leprosy and General Hospital. They had been told that the hospital needed to be revived, having become defunct 10 years earlier after the missionaries running
read more...
Future of healthcare
A former foreign minister of Singapore in search of a cure for his Parkinson’s disease admitted himself to the hospital at the Institute of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine (I-AIM) in Bengaluru. He had the typical Parkinson’s symptoms of tremors, imbalance and problems with gait. Of course, he had access to
read more...
Kolkata queer month goes beyond Pride
When the Queer Arts Month 2.0 opened in Kolkata recently it marked yet another step forward in the long and complicated quest for a better understanding of people with different gender and sexual identities. The show was put together innovatively by Navonil Das and Anindya Hajra to convey that there
read more...
Can the Yamuna be revived?
The Yamuna is one of India’s most sacred rivers. But on its 22-km stretch through Delhi, the Yamuna gets reduced to being a polluted drain. Four decades of efforts to restore the river have mostly ended in failure. Delhi, one of India’s richest cities, does to the Yamuna what Indian
read more...
The flight of a Generation
IN 2024 India overtook China as the biggest source of tuition paying students with 3,31,602 students securing visas to study in the US, representing a 23 percent increase over the previous year. Indian enrolments increased primarily at the graduate level, reported The Times of India, accounting for 19 percent of the total student
read more...
Himalayan springs are dying
SPRINGS that have for centuries met the domestic needs of people in the Himalayan region are now disappearing, leaving them without a dependable natural source of water. Known to be perennial, the springs provide cool, clean and sweet water that gurgles out of mountainsides. From the cold deserts of Lahaul-Spiti
read more...
Listening to Ladakh
WHEN you live up there in the Himalayas, how do you make yourself heard in Delhi? In an era of instant communications, the possibilities are many. But chances also are that you might end up walking the entire distance to the capital in the hope that someone notices. Ask Sonam
read more...
The new and juicy bael has arrived
In the blistering summer of northern India, everyone is familiar with the benefits of a soothing glass of bael juice. But the humble and drab-looking fruit’s popularity soon fades when the weather changes. In the hierarchy of the fruit kingdom, it ranks at the bottom in terms of appeal and
read more...