Kashmir’s apple growers are learning to beat the heat
The roads of South Kashmir’s Shopian district are crowded with workers and vehicles. This district is called the apple bowl of Kashmir, and the air here is thick with the aroma of freshly picked fruit. Ladders lean against the trunks of apple trees while workers climb into the clusters of
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How cool is a mosque!
The afternoon sun shone brutally overhead. The few pedestrians kept close to walls and shop fronts, seeking patches of shade. The heat forced most people to stay indoors, making the streets deserted. But Srinagar’s century-old Jamia Masjid seemed to belong to a different world. The sun did not cast its
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‘Processed foods are driven by daily corporate hard-sell’
A range of packaged foods picked up thoughtlessly for consumption contain hidden dangers. The list of such foods is long — cereal bars, biscuits, noodles, nachos and much more. Nobody warns the consumer that these ultra-processed foods are full of salt, sugar and fats. That is about to change. An ongoing
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Wear a Raja Ravi Varma masterpiece as a saree
Merging Mahatma Gandhi’s khadi cloth and Raja Ravi Varma’s iconic paintings sounds impossibly radical. But that’s what two textile revivalists, Gaurang Shah and Lavina Baldota, set out to achieve. It took them all of six years to weave intricate paintings into cloth, using the jamdani technique, and create a collection
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Wearing the lungi with full freedom by design
Purushu Arie was working as a menswear designer for Lee Cooper in Mumbai when he happened to visit a factory in Tirupur. At a four-star hotel, frequented by international buyers, a signboard caught his eye. It read: “Do not wear a lungi in the hotel premises to avoid indecency to
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‘Artisans already have the skills. It is not a high cost to support them’
Almost four decades ago Poonam Muttreja was a co-founder of Dastkar, the iconic nonprofit that helps craftspeople come into their own with small enterprises. She now returns to the organization as chairperson to further strengthen its efforts to promote handicrafts in India and help artisans access the finance, marketing prowess
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‘Our board lets us fly, keeps asking all the right questions’
It has been a decade since companies were mandated by law to spend a percentage of their profits on corporate social responsibility or CSR. The company board, through a committee under it, became answerable for the choice of CSR projects and how they were implemented. What impact has this had
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High-speed rail should be the big move India makes’
MORE Indians are flying than ever before. But in the process is air travel getting too clunky and burdensome? Perhaps it is time to balance the emphasis on flying with fast and efficient train services over short inter-regional distances. An opportunity beckons in linking up cities big and small and
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