Finds the story everyone else's newsroom scrolled past. Dry, a little merciless, always looking for what's actually going on underneath.
· 5 min read
The uncertainty around one of New Delhi’s earliest apartment communities reveals how quickly a city mistakes cultural memory for an obstacle to redevelopment. Preservation must protect lived neighbourhoods, not embalm façades after residents and institutions vanish.
· 7 min read
Meghalaya’s Jingkieng Jri make our obsession with fast construction look childish. Their real wonder is not botanical novelty but intergenerational public work—and tourism must not turn that patience into a prop.
· 6 min read
Puzhakkal Pavithra became a symbol before most viewers learned her name. The speed with which every faction claimed or condemned her shows how social media turns ordinary participants into public property.
· 6 min read
The sight of baby orangutans receiving fruit and toys at an Odisha zoo invited the usual feel-good response. I see evidence of a market that turns endangered animals into luxury merchandise and leaves rescuers to manage the consequences.
· 5 min read
A museum devoted to toilets sounds like a novelty stop, but sanitation history exposes how technology, caste, dignity and urban planning meet. The embarrassment belongs not to the exhibits but to societies that refuse to discuss the systems everyone uses.
· 4 min read
A public Lego installation invited residents to dismantle it together, only for a government visit to interrupt the experiment. The episode is a perfect miniature of how India manages spontaneous civic joy.
· 5 min read
A clay idol made by Pune prison inmates offered something public spectacle rarely does: a route back into society through skilled work. Rehabilitation becomes credible when we value the maker, not merely the uplifting story.
· 5 min read
The city’s independent bookstores are not nostalgic relics resisting technology. They thrive because human recommendations, physical browsing and unplanned discovery offer something an online catalogue cannot optimise without destroying it.
· 5 min read
Corporate seminars turned the dabbawalas into a slogan about efficiency while ignoring the labour, rail dependence and fragile economics underneath. Their real lesson is cooperation, not managerial magic.
· 6 min read
A village associated with doorless homes reveals how trust is performed, marketed and selectively remembered. The remarkable part is not supernatural crime prevention; it is the social pressure required to keep a famous story intact.
· 5 min read
Hope Singh’s move from Atlanta to rural Bihar became viral material because people wanted it to validate their own insecurities. Her actual story is smaller, harder and more human: belonging is made through compromise.
· 6 min read
Delhi’s count of roosting parakeets sounds delightfully minor beside the capital’s grand crises. I think its value lies precisely in forcing a city to notice the loud, adaptable wildlife it normally treats as green wallpaper.
· 6 min read
Visitors photograph the post office on Dal Lake as a charming curiosity. Its deeper value is that it treats communities living and working on water as citizens entitled to ordinary services, not scenery arranged for tourists.
· 5 min read
Turning abandoned public rooms into village libraries is the rare bureaucratic idea that is cheap, visible and replicable. Its genius lies less in the books than in recognising that quiet space is infrastructure.
· 7 min read
Vijay Kumar Sharma reportedly cleared a teaching examination after decades of attempts. His persistence is moving, but the deeper story is how tightly India ties dignity to one late government appointment.
