Breakout films make it big

Saibal Chatterjee

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

Listening to Ladakh

Civil Society News, New Delhi

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

Rethinking the smog

Chandra Bhushan

IT is 6.30 in the morning and you are starting your day in Gurugram. A thin fog, more like a mist, hangs low outside. You check your phone for the weather report to see if there could be rain coming. Along with the weather, you check the Air Quality Index

Himalayan springs are dying

Venkatesh Dutta

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

The new and juicy bael has arrived

Shree Padre

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

Seeking teachers

Civil Society News, New Delhi

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

Master of the museum piece

Umesh Anand, Benaulim

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

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

Fund someone’s reading glasses

Civil Society News, New Delhi

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

Blessed is the rural hospital

Civil Society News, New Delhi

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

The next pandemic?

By Dr Ravikant Singh

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

Doctors out there

Civil Society News, New Delhi

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

Future of healthcare

Darshan Shankar

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

Kolkata queer month goes beyond Pride

Aiema Tauheed

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

Can the Yamuna be revived?

Venkatesh Dutta

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

The flight of a Generation

Sanjaya Baru

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