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  • Run, Lila Run

    There was a time when running meant one person, one pair of shoes, and one quiet road before sunrise. That version of the sport hasn’t disappeared, but it is no longer the whole story. Across Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi and beyond, running has turned into something closer to a movement: part workout, part social calendar, part identity.

    Running clubs in India aren’t actually new. But battered and bruised by the pandemic years, Indians began joining these clubs in droves. What better way to slip into the rhythms of a post-pandemic life than to run down a street with the buzz of a crowd filled with like-minded people, whilst pandering to the demands of fitness?

    The health benefits of running are undeniable. But for most members of run clubs, that is only one part of a far greater appeal. Those of us cocooned within our safe social circles, content to resonate within the sounds of our own echo chambers, grow to let our down our guard, the running catalysing the process of coming together in a shared experience with shared goals. Equally, the clubs function as sanctuaries for lonely people to seek out new friends, and to free all of us from the clutches of doomscrolling, at least for an hour or so.

     

     

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    This isn’t just a vibe; the numbers reflect it. An estimated 1,500 timed races held in 2025, suggest, by extrapolation, that about 2 million people participated in these races. Tied to this, India’s running gear market was valued at roughly 2.4 billion dollars in 2024 and is projected to double by 2033, driven by rising health awareness, urbanization, growing disposable income and a steady increase in marathons and local races. And informal estimates peg the number of run clubs in India at several hundred.

    Bombay Running is a good example of the growth of the run club. Its first run in 2017 drew just four people to Nariman Point. It has since ballooned to sixty participants, and offers personalized coaching, structured training plans and even its own merchandise. In this way, it has made running less intimidating to wary beginners.

    Elsewhere in the city, Striders takes runners from Dadar to Powai, while Adidas Runners runs in Bandra and marine Drive. Pinkathon, co-founded by Milind Soman, attempts to empower female runners. Run India Run operates marathon-training centers. Then there are hyperlocal groups like the Lokhandwala Running Club or the Tilak Nagar Running Club.

    Sometimes, running feels almost besides the point. Bengaluru’s Daud Run Club, for instance, draws people together for a spurt of casual runs combined with DJs that follow the group, coffee raves, post-run pickleball, even picnic runs. Similarly, 56 Run Club is run as an initiative that treats running as a starting point for a broader social life. Not only do the members run on traditional surfaces, they have even reinvented the entire format by leading a huffing-puffing group up flights of stairs in a multi-storeyed building in Bengaluru (followed by a DJ set, of course). Pune’s We Persist is redefining run clubs in the same way, by offering coffee, breakfast, live house music, DJ sets, even pop-ups all in the wake of a weekend run. Bombay Hash, part of the global Hash House Harriers network, pairs short runs with beer afterward.

     

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    Commercial interest has followed the runners. Decathlon, which entered the Indian market in 2009, now supports running and cycling communities out of its stores and partnered with 174 running events across the country in 2025 alone.
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    In fact, the japes and jollity of the social run may run counter to the serious runner’s aspirations. There is an entire Mumbai sub-reddit urging athletes to steer clear of the clubs as they are “just masti, nothing to do with serious running” (as one disgruntled Redditor put it). On the other hand, “I’m an active participant of a run club in Bombay and we meet by 6:45, have a nice warm up/ sprint session followed by the run and finish our runs by 8:15,” says another Redditor in the same forum. Different strokes for different folks.

    Where people go, commerce follows, and the run club is no exception; in fact, many partner with brands to offer running merchandise. Decathlon has partnered with 174 running events across the country in 2025 alone. Adidas hosts running groups in Bandra and Marine Drive, Nike has organized women-focused evening runs in Mumbai, and even Bumble has teamed up with Puma to turn group runs into a dating format. For these companies, sponsoring a run club offers something more durable than a one-off ad campaign: a way to become part of people’s weekly routines.

     

     

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    Platforms like the Strava app, Nike Run Club and Adidas Running have all turned individual runs into shareable data: a simple swipe of the phone immediately reveals distance, pace, elevation and consistency. Posting a 5K to Instagram or X has become its own small ritual, generating encouragement and a sense of accountability that keeps people coming back.

    The next phase of India’s run club movement is likely to be less about growing in size and more about growing in depth, building hyperlocal ecosystems where relationships are sustained rather than one-off. That could mean specialized gear designed for Indian climates, neighborhood-level funding, or infrastructure like hydration stations and rest stops that treat run clubs as permanent fixtures of city life rather than a passing trend. Whatever form it takes, the direction is clear: running in India is no longer just about the miles. It’s about who you run them with.

  • Why Bengaluru Blooms

    Every March, your feed turns pink. Streets carpeted in petals, trees bursting into colour — like someone dropped springtime straight into Bengaluru. It’s easy to think of cherry blossoms in Japan, but this isn’t Tokyo. This is Indiranagar. Or Jayanagar. Or some unassuming street corner where a Tabebuia tree just decided to show off.

    So why does Bengaluru bloom like this?

    Turns out, it’s not just luck. The city’s reputation as the Garden City isn’t just about a few parks — it’s baked into its very design.

    As the city expanded, successive rulers and administrations continued adding to this landscape. What looks today like a naturally leafy city was partly the result of generations of deliberate planning: tanks, gardens, avenues, orchards and shaded public spaces were built into Bengaluru’s growth. The city’s famous green character was cultivated long before it became a technology capital.

     

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    One of the most important early examples was Lalbagh, which harks back to the time of Haidar Ali band Tipu Sultan. Ali grew the garden in the 18th century, and Tipu Sultan expanded it, turning it into a place not simply for pleasure but for horticultural experimentation. Two mango trees still remain of those times, believed to be planted by Tipu Sultan in the 1770s. Several years later came Cubbon Park, born in 1870 in colonial Bangalore by a British commissioner of that name; it initially covered around 100 acres before pushing even further into the built city.

    Bengaluru is equally indebted to Krishna Raja Wodeyar IV, whose long reign in the early 20th century saw the birth of a further wave of parks, gardens and lakes across the city. Cubbon Park itself was formally renamed for the Wodeyar family (even though it is still colloquially known as Cubbon Park today).

    In the early 1900s, a German horticulturist named Gustav Hermann Krumbiegel — the man behind much of Lalbagh — introduced something called ‘serial blooming’. He planted flowering trees with different bloom cycles so that something would always be in flower. That’s why just as the pink Tabebuias start to fade, the purples of Jacaranda take over. Then come the flaming reds of Gulmohar in summer. It’s a quiet relay race of colour.

    Add to that Bengaluru’s mild weather, decent rainfall, and reasonably fertile soil — perfect conditions for trees to thrive. Colonial-era city planners, with their love of ornamental landscaping, brought in exotic species that adapted surprisingly well here. Over time, they became part of the city’s personality.

     

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    The city's reputation as the Garden City isn't just about a few parks — it's baked into its very design.
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    There is another reason the trees feel so deeply woven into the fabric of the city: rather than fencing them into gardens, Bengaluru’s early planners built tree-limned streets and shaded homes and institutions, softening (and cooling) a dense, urban space. The gardens and lakes, once essential infrastructure that undergirded the city, grew into its visual identity as well.

    But it’s not just about the past. Residents today still fight to keep the city green. From neighbourhood tree planting drives to citizen-led protests against deforestation, there’s a quiet but steady push to protect what’s left. And maybe part of why people care so much is because these trees aren’t just ‘green cover’. They’re memory markers. Anyone who’s lived in Bengaluru long enough has a story set under one of them. 

     

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    And the numbers explain the urgency. An IISc study found that Bengaluru’s green cover has fallen to around 3 percent of the city today, down from roughly 70 percent in 1970. Over the same broad period, the city’s built-up area expanded more than tenfold — from about 8 percent of the land in 1973 to over 93 percent by 2023.

    A galaxy of citizen-led initiatives have risen up in revolt of these numbers. Amongst the foremost is Heritage Beku, campaigning to protect trees, parks and historic landscapes. Its #KillBill campaign opposing proposed changes to Karnataka’s tree-protection legislation gathered more than 50,000 signatures. And the flowering trees themselves have become a form of cultural heritage. Heritage Beku’s own initiative, Hoovu Habba seeks to honor the city’s serial blooming cycles by hosting walks, lectures, readings etc.

    Neralu is a citizen-run tree festival held in Cubbon Park that spearheads tree-mapping drives together with tree walks, talks, art workshops, storytelling and film screenings.

    Bengaluru is abloom with similar initiatives: from Hasiru Usiru, an older environmental collective to Gubbi Labs (organizers of citizen-science tree-mapping and identification workshops) to Namma Bengaluru Foundation’s tree advocacy (in one instance, volunteers surveyed more than a hundred trees along a proposed suburban rail route to identify which could be saved from felling) and Vruksha Foundation and Parisarakagi Navu.

     

     

     

    Not every gathering under Bengaluru’s trees is explicitly about activism. Cubbon Reads, a silent reading community that meets every Saturday morning in Cubbon Park, started with six people in 2022 and has since grown into a large recurring gathering, inspiring similar reading meetups in parks elsewhere.

    The city’s blooms aren’t just pretty. They remind us of another Bengaluru — before the flyovers and the office parks, when the city was slower, sleepier, and maybe even a little bit softer. They carry a kind of nostalgia that’s hard to describe but easy to feel.

    And that’s probably why we photograph them so much. Not just because they’re beautiful, but because they feel like something we don’t want to lose. In a city that’s always rushing toward the future, the flowers are a pause button.

    So the next time you see a tree throwing pink across the street, maybe stop and look up. This didn’t happen by accident. Someone planted that, years ago, thinking it might make your day better.

  • Bittersweet Symphony

    India is a tea-drinking country, or so the cliche goes. But as all stereotypes go, this paints only one part of a much larger picture. The other half tells us that coffee had seeped into the bloodstream of the country long before chai became bound with its identity.

    Right from the colonial era, coffee was coveted by wealthy sophisticates in clubs and refreshment rooms, a couple of which were owned by Armenians, or hawked by kahwewalas, Muslim street vendors of Indian, African or Arab origin; natural, since the city was peopled by Muslim traders from countries such as Aden, in which coffee was extraordinarily popular. Most popular, though, were the itinerant coffee vendors who roamed the streets of cities like Mumbai with a pillar of stacked coffee cups which they clanged like castanets, together with a stove and a kettle made of copper or tin.

    Still, it had not yet conquered the mainstream, especially since many Indians looked upon it with disfavour as a corrupting, ‘Western’ influence. A few canny Indians did hop on the coffee train as soon as they realized its potential. For instance, Indian dairy purveyors Polson’s marketed ground coffee to the Europeans from 1887. Meanwhile, coffee traveled to South Indian states such as Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, ensconcing itself into the country’s culinary fabric through the famous milky South Indian filter coffee.

    The next big shift came about when the Coffee Board opened coffee houses – this became a tremendously successful initiative in cities such as Kolkata, where the space became an adda for anti-colonial-minded young Bengalis – by 1948, there were at least forty-three outlets across the country.

     

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    Then, in the 1990s, economic liberalisation opened India to the world, and coffee piqued the interest of a brand new generation of entrepreneurs and consumers. A cafe felt modern and fresh in a way that India had never seen before, and brands like Cafe Coffee Day and Barista became the faces of that era.

    They were the precursors to Starbucks, which shouldered its way into the country in 2012. Eventually, these big companies would pave the way for a swathe of homegrown specialty roasters: stylish passion projects such as Blue Tokai, Third Wave Coffee, Subko and others.

    The coffee industry likes to talk about itself in waves: coffee as a raw commodity, then the rise of the modern café, then a focus on origin and craft, then the arrival of science and precision brewing. Some in the industry now argue India has brewed its way forward to the fifth wave, one built around taking genuinely good specialty coffee and scaling it up.

     

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    Young people in Indian cities used to build their social lives around malls, multiplexes and nightlife. Now the café has taken that spot.
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    All of these brands have fuelled a wave in coffee cultures around the country. Young people in Indian cities used to build their social lives around malls, multiplexes and nightlife. Now the café has taken that spot. People go there to work, to meet friends, to relax away from family; the coffee is almost beside the point.

    Some of this can be attributed to the aesthetics of a well-designed cafe, built with social media in mind, with comfortable seating meant for laptops and long stays, and somewhat affordable coffee for the long-stayers. Again, thanks to social media, matcha and cold brew jostle comfortably together on the same menu as a simple espresso or black coffee. Even things like alcohol-free ‘Coffee Raves’, daytime dance events fuelled by caffeine, show how differently young Indians are choosing to socialize.

     

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    And while major urban centers such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Jaipur still lead the scene, smaller cities are no slouch when it comes to specialty coffee either with demand for specialty coffee has been climbing steadily in tier 2 and tier 3 towns; a clear function of a burgeoning middle class with more aspirational spending capabilities.

    India’s coffee ambitions aren’t staying inside the country. Blue Tokai, Subko, Nothing Before Coffee and Roastery Coffee House have all opened cafés abroad in the last few years, in Japan, the UAE, Portugal and Finland, alongside growing e-commerce operations overseas.

    Most recently, Odisha-based roaster and café chain Kruti Coffee opened its first overseas outlet in London. The store serves espresso drinks and a rotating pour-over menu, all sourced from Kruti’s Bhubaneswar roastery. In July 2026, Kruti became one of the first Indian businesses to ship goods to the UK under the newly signed India-UK Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, a deal that could make it easier for other Indian roasters to follow.

     

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    In July 2026, Kruti became one of the first Indian businesses to ship goods to the UK under the newly signed India-UK Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, a deal that could make it easier for other Indian roasters to follow.
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    Meanwhile, North America appears to be shuffling in another direction. Remote work and narrower budgets are elbowing more and more people to drink home-brewed coffee rather than at a cafe: a recent U.S. National Coffee Association survey found 85% of Americans who drank coffee the day before had done it at home, the highest share since 2012.

    Even so, US coffee is abuzz with experiments. The latest craze appears to be health, in the form of protein-sluiced caffeine (a trend that shows up in India’s Starbucks as well) and mushroom coffee, made with ingredients like lion’s mane and reishi (once a mainstay of niche wellness stores). Following the trend of savory cocktails, coffees too are mixing miso with caramel, pistachio with salt, and even spring onion. And a cheering trend (one that is reflected in smaller coffee initiatives in India as well) is sustainability; brands like Nespresso are now partnering with the Rainforest Alliance on regenerative farming.

    Two countries, two different coffee moments: one rediscovering the café as a place to be, the other pulling back into the kitchen. Either way, coffee in 2026 is doing more than keeping people awake. It’s shaping how they spend their time, what they think of themselves, and increasingly, where a cup of coffee can travel to from its country of origin.

  • Who’s Teaching The (AI) Teacher?

    What if a chatbot could tutor a child in algebra or in Hindi, at home, and tailored to their exact learning pace? What if it could walk a nervous Japanese student through a class presentation or help a Nigerian teen revise for a national exam, all without judgment or pressure?

    This is the promise that artificial intelligence in education keeps hinting at: deeply personalized, scalable learning. In theory, it could solve teacher shortages, bridge urban-rural divides, even offer support when parents can’t. But how that promise plays out looks very different depending on where you are — because education isn’t a one-size-fits-all system. It’s shaped by local languages, cultural values, and access gaps that global AI tools often fail to account for.

    In India, education spans extremes: from rote-heavy government schools to elite institutions pushing international-style teaching. Many students still rely on memorisation to clear high-stakes entrance exams like NEET and JEE — ultra-competitive national tests that determine access to medical and engineering colleges for millions. Caste, class, and gender biases often shape who gets quality instruction and who feels seen in a classroom. And while Hindi and English dominate urban curricula, dozens of regional languages remain underserved by mainstream educational tools — digital or otherwise.

     

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    In South Korea, students stay up late at hagwons — after-school tutoring centres — because academic performance is closely tied to university entrance and family pride. In Finland, by contrast, education emphasises curiosity, group work, and minimal homework. In Kenya, overcrowded classrooms mean teachers juggle multiple languages and learning levels. And in the US, education centres on participation and self-expression — but access still heavily depends on zip codes and systemic inequality.

    The point is: education is never culturally neutral. It’s shaped by social norms, parental expectations, historical inequities, language politics, and attitudes toward authority. It’s about how you’re taught to learn — whether you’re expected to memorize or question, speak up or stay quiet, work alone or in groups.

    So what happens when AI — mostly developed in Western labs — is introduced into this messy, diverse global reality?

    AI in education isn’t some distant future. It’s already creeping in: from virtual tutors in Indian edtech apps to AI-generated feedback tools in American classrooms. South Korea has been piloting adaptive AI since 2022. Kenya and Ghana are exploring AI to boost rural access. China is trialling emotion-tracking software in schools — controversially, but ambitiously. But the real question isn’t just about tech infrastructure or screen access. It’s about cultural alignment.

    Can a language model trained on Western academic texts truly grasp the pressure-cooker intensity of India’s exam system? Can it understand why a Japanese student might hesitate to ask questions — not out of confusion, but because standing out is discouraged? Would it know why oral storytelling matters as much as textbooks in many African classrooms?

     

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    AI in education isn’t some distant future. It’s already creeping in: from virtual tutors in Indian edtech apps to AI-generated feedback tools in American classrooms.
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    AI might offer infinite knowledge. But whether it understands the classroom it’s entering — that’s the harder lesson.

    These aren’t bugs in the system — they are the system. And if AI is going to play a real role in global education, it has to go beyond just speeding things up or improving test scores. It needs to understand how different communities learn, not just what they’re learning.

    That’s not to say AI doesn’t belong in the classroom. In fact, if done right, it could be a game-changer. In parts of India, AI tutors are already helping kids in under-resourced schools get the kind of personalised attention that would otherwise be impossible. In the US, some schools are using AI to catch reading struggles early — things a teacher might take months to notice. And in countries where students juggle multiple languages, AI could switch between them on the fly — say, from Hindi to English or Yoruba to French — making learning more accessible for those who are often left behind.

    But when AI doesn’t account for cultural context, it can backfire. An AI tutor trained on Western norms might penalise an Indian student for relying on memorisation, or flag a Japanese student as disengaged for not asking enough questions — not realising that both behaviours are shaped by local classroom expectations. A well-meaning algorithm could end up misreading learning styles as learning gaps.

    But for any of that to truly work, the tech itself needs to get smarter culturally. It needs to be built with an understanding of the students it’s meant to serve.

     

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    That means building more localised datasets. What counts as “correct” or “helpful” feedback can vary drastically across cultures. A prompt that resonates in Nairobi might completely miss the mark in Nagaland. Without datasets that reflect linguistic diversity, socioeconomic realities, and neurodivergent learners, AI risks baking bias into pedagogy — reinforcing what’s familiar rather than what’s fair.

    It also means having more diverse teams designing and testing these tools — people who understand the contexts they’re meant to serve. And perhaps most importantly, it calls for deeper conversations about what education should look like in each place — not just what’s easiest to build or scale.

    If AI is really going to teach the world, it has to start by learning from it — in all its nuance, noise, and difference.

  • Behind The Podium

    We’re hearing it tomtommed everywhere now. The Indian sports scene is evolving at high speed, and while the country’s preoccupation with cricket will never quite run out of steam, interest in other sports is certainly multiplying by leaps and bounds. The country’s badminton players are holding their own against the Chinese and the Danes. India, once a hockey-obsessed country, is slowly scrambling to climb back up to earlier heights; it’s certainly on its way thanks to the bronze medal prised from German hands at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Neeraj Chopra turned was the first javelin thrower from Asia to win a gold at the Olympics (in 2020). Rather surprisingly, India’s shooters have carted away seven medals at the Olympics (from 2004 onwards). And in chess, the country that invented the game is now producing a tumult of grandmasters.

    On the face of it, the India Rising narrative appears to be invincible. But can a few extra medals scattered across the years really equal structural change? Is India really a sporting nation? After all, the country has produced plenty of champions over the decades  — Milkha Singh in 1958, P T Usha in 1984. The real test is whether the last decade or so built an ecosystem: coaching, facilities, funding, scouting. That’s a much higher bar to surmount.

    In the last two decades or so, there has certainly been a plumping of infrastructure thanks to business houses such as the Tatas throwing their heft behind football, polo, boxing, hockey and badminton. Government initiatives have joggled the scale upwards too, and the media has dutifully followed suit, with broadcasters becoming facilitators by showcasing a range of sport beyond cricket.

     

     

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    The sharpest indicator of a rise comes through badminton. Before 2012, India had zero individual Olympic medals in the sport. Then came Saina Nehwal’s 2012 win, PV Sindhu medalling in 2016 and 2020, and a men’s doubles bronze in 2024. That’s not one gifted player fighting against the odds to reach the top — academies like Pullela Gopichand’s in Hyderabad have been turning out Olympic medalists and top-ranked players across multiple events for over a decade now.

    Hockey, on the other hand, was once the lifeline of the nation in the way cricket is today, then faded away entirely, and is now clawing its way back by winning Olympic bronze medals in Tokyo and Paris. But India is yet to climb to an Olympic final; 1980 was the last year in which it did so. Two bronzes raise the floor considerably. But they certainly don’t put India back in the conversation with the Netherlands, Australia or Germany for gold.

     

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    Hockey, on the other hand, was once the lifeline of the nation in the way cricket is today, then faded away entirely, and is now clawing its way back by winning Olympic bronze medals in Tokyo and Paris.
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    Athletics and shooting paint a slightly grayer picture. Even though the plethora of medals is commendable, Neeraj Chopra’s gold and silver in the javelin throw were assisted by the Target Olympic Podium Scheme, which provided funding for foreign coaches and European training, among other things. Shooting has a longer history and is India’s most successful sport at the Commonwealth Games.

    The problem is that TOPS is designed to help athletes who have already demonstrated a superlative ability. It does little to address the more pressing issue of finding and then developing a wider pool of talent; Chopra himself has stated that funding should be awarded to athletes who have not yet made their mark, rather than those who have.

    Chess doesn’t fit the government-investment story at all. India’s current wave owes more to online coaching platforms, a deep bench of private coaches built up since Vishwanathan Anand’s era, and families funding their own kids’ tournament travel.

    Then there’s the Deloitte “Think Sports” report, often waved around as proof of a broader transformation, and it’s worth being clear about what it actually measures: fans, not athletes. Of India’s 655 million sports fans, 90% now follow more than one sport — kabaddi has 120 million fans, football 85 million. Gen Z, 43% of that base, gets 93% of its sport digitally and, unusually, keeps engaging in the off-season. People spend 20% more time on on-demand content than live events. The sporting goods market is projected to nearly double to $58 billion by 2030.

     

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    When can a country truly call itself a sporting nation? When facilities are easily accessible even to the rural athlete and the marginalized, when athletic medals carry the heft of professional legitimacy, and when sports become a financially viable occupation. Most of all, we become a sporting nation when athletics are accepted and respected as a viable career, not a mere hobby for schoolchildren. We still have a long way to go there.

    The numbers tell a rather stark tale – only about 1,00,000 playgrounds for roughly 350 million students; fewer than 50 international‑standard stadiums; a few dozen swimming pools, and even fewer shooting ranges or indoor stadiums for badminton, weightlifting, boxing, gymnastics, and other sports, and perhaps 200 universities, 500 schools, and some clubs with infrastructure large enough for various games.

    There is a yawning gap between official rhetoric and execution, and the National Sports Policy 2025 seeks to address it by calling for integrating sport with education and creating viable dual‑career pathways for young athletes. The Khelo India University Games have given thousands of student‑athletes a national stage. But policy can create a pathway only if institutions are willing to rebuild themselves around it.

  • A Question Of Vocabulary

    The Internet woke up to its latest controversy some days ago. Somewhere on social media, a garrulous post was being shared and reshared; someone somewhere had read the word ‘scrying’, hadn’t quite understood it, and lambasted anyone who used the word as committing a sort of verbal violence. The suggestion being that the correct option was to use the words ‘fortune telling’. Whether the original poster was being ironic or not is unclear.

    The post flew around the Internet like wildfire; unfamiliar words, we were told, are ableist. The argument built to include people with dyslexia, people who are neurodivergent, oppressed caste or marginalized people who never got the education to build a large vocabulary. Stop showing off, the writer is told. If you don’t, you’re excluding a majority of readers.

    It would be easy to laugh this off. It would also be a mistake, because there is a real grievance buried inside the overreach, and pretending otherwise just guarantees that both sides talk past each other.

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    It’s undeniable that language can exclude, and the most well meaning writer or speaker might use words that put everyone off; Shashi Tharoor for instance, has been mocked for using high – falutin (yet precise) words, that most of India would need a dictionary to parse. Not everyone has the linguistic wherewithal to grapple with difficult words, and the educationally marginalized and people with learning disabilities largely bear the brunt of this, especially when ableist words such as ‘tone-deaf’ or ‘falling on deaf ears’ are used. Someone who grew up in an under-resourced school, or who is still building fluency in a second language, is not being lazy when faced with a paragraph of dense prose. Access to a large vocabulary is not equal; for everyone who grew up with a vast library of books at home, there’s someone who had to scrounge for access to a library card. And so it would be pusillanimous to deny that language is exclusivist.

    But perhaps it could also be condescending. To assume that a person isn’t willing, or able to understand or learn new words constitutes an even worse violence, that of mollycoddling a reader simply because the writer thinks they can’t do better. Actual disability advocates have spent years arguing against exactly this move: the tendency to speak for disabled people as a uniform, fragile bloc rather than as individuals with wildly different needs, preferences, and capacities. After all, sometimes the most appropriate word is in fact, ‘scrying’, and not ‘fortune telling’, and that’s okay.

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    Bland-washing language at a time when the Western world is reportedly facing a crisis of literacy is a sad irony. Besides, one might argue, a piece of writing becomes flat and bone-dry without the flourish of language.
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    Readers of this piece may or may not struggle with the use of the word ‘pusillanimous’, a perfectly understandable position. But perhaps a hard word is not a door bolted shut. Perhaps it is a narrow corridor that opens into a magnificent library. A reader who doesn’t know ‘scrying’ or pusillanimous’ can google it in a minute, and then have the satisfaction of growing in a small, but significant way. It’s a strange kind of solidarity that assumes the person on the other end of the sentence is too fragile to reach for a dictionary.

    Bland-washing language at a time when the Western world is reportedly facing a crisis of literacy is a sad irony. Besides, one might argue, a piece of writing becomes flat and bone-dry without the flourish of language. For everyone who extols the spare writing of Ernest Hemingway, there’s someone who thrills at the maximalist prose of Salman Rushdie. Both can, and must, co-exist. In this way, we can deepen and enrich our thinking.

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    So what is a writer to do? Of course there is no perfect prescription for writing, but it does behove us to use ‘bereft’, because the word ‘sad’ just doesn’t mean the same thing at all. Those two obligations point in different directions, and a writer serious about language has to sit with both instead of collapsing into either the ‘vocabulary is a weapon’ camp or the “difficulty is always innocent” camp. Precision in language is not a hostile act, but condescension might be.

    At the end of the day, the actual question was never about using big words or small words. It was always about the right word — and sometimes the right word is the hardest one of all.

  • Strangers At Supper

  • Gray Matters

    For as long as anyone can remember, fashion meant the strut of the nubile down the runway, the piercing gaze of the ingenue on the cover of a magazine. In 2016, one of the world’s most famous models was 10-year-old Kristina Pimenova, dubbed as “the most beautiful girl in the world”, with over one million Instagram followers and four million Facebook followers. And by 30, most models had aged out; those still modelling, were considered ‘mature’. That the fashion world has always been creepily obsessed with youth has never been in doubt.

    But the tables are turning, albeit slowly.

    Chanel’s Matthieu Blazy opened his Haute Couture show with 50-year-old model Stéphanie Cavalli. The 52-year-old Kate Moss wore a plunging backless dress to close a Gucci show. Twiggy, at the age of 76, models for Burberry. Iman, at 67, graced the cover of British Vogue. In 2026, Meryl Streep and Anna Wintour, both impossibly striking at 76, sat together for the cover of Vogue USA. And most iconic of all, 88-year-old Dame Maggie Smith, became the most unforgettable face of Loewe.

     

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    Something similar is happening in India, although we still have a steep climb ahead. At the age of 70-plus, Zeenat Aman struck a pose for Vogue India while in the same year, Vogue Arabia put Rekha on their cover. And in 2022, Madhuri Dixit posed for the cover of Harper’s Bazaar.

    These aren’t giant steps for womankind perhaps, but they are gentle strolls in the right direction. There’s no denying that this is a reckoning that has been a long time coming. But it is equally true that behind the glam and glitz lies the glister of cold, hard economics.

    In an uneven economy, the demographic with the highest spending power is bound to be that of the older consumer, and growth in luxury spending is increasingly coming from that group. McKinsey’s analysis reveals that roughly half of spending power, comes thanks to the fifty-plus demographic — which makes ignoring that audience look less like an oversight and more like bad business. And in the USA, more than 70 percent of the country’s wealth is cupped firmly in the hands of the over 55 demographic. The silver dollar, it turns out, clangs rather loudly.

    Equally, change is being wrought from inside the room; women, especially older women, are now in positions of power across the fashion industry. From the inside, one presumes, patriarchy is being shattered.

    At the same time, social media has democratized who we see on our screens. Zeenat Aman’s Instagram account shows her bright, beautiful, vivid life, acting and modelling and advocating for animal welfare. Over in the USA, supermodel Paulina Porizkova flaunts her laugh lines and newly-acquired curves. Such visibility, untainted by the airbrush, helps to combat societal norms, entrenched in ideas of plastic surgery and looksmaxxing.

     

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    Equally, change is being wrought from inside the room; women, especially older women, are now in positions of power across the fashion industry.
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    But the industry’s embrace comes with an asterisk. Critics point out that age inclusivity demands very little structural change from the industry, unlike size inclusivity; the models may have a few more wrinkles or streaks of silver in their hair, but they are essentially the same skinny, tall, statuesque women they have always been.

    Often, these are women who have had cosmetic work done, or are retouched to make it seem that way. Would an average woman identify in any way with these twig-thin, perfectly made up, mature models? No. Would an average woman identify with a younger, more size inclusive model? Also no. The worry is that the industry is layering one stereotype over another, albeit with the gloss of diversity.

     

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    Even so, the consensus appears to be that fashion is indeed facing a structural change, rather than just a passing trend. Where India differs from Paris and New York is scale and speed. The runway shift abroad is being driven by money moving through a well-established machine of magazines, campaigns and casting directors. India’s version is happening more organically, through individual women marching to the best of their own drum, telling their own stories rather than waiting for brands to notice them. Either way, fashion is having an awakening of sorts; an awakening with hopefully no expiration date.

  • Binoculars Over Doomscrolling

    There is something almost suspiciously wholesome about the recent rise of birding. The fact that people are putting down their phones and lifting up their eyes to the skies, to catch a fleeting glimpse of a winged traveler? The fact that instead of waking up and immediately doomscrolling, people are waking before sunrise for a stroll in their local park? The idea that Instagram is passé and binoculars and cameras are in? Wholesome.

    Birdwatching now has the world in its claw. An activity once condescendingly seen as a retiree’s hobby is now firing the fancy of millennials, Gen Z and Gen X. It’s now cool to post bird photographs and videos, to recognize the call of the neighborhood nightjar, to follow the birder podcasts. It’s cool to stand under a tree for hours, arms akimbo and binoculars at the ready, eyes straining for a flash of blue or a flutter of fuchsia.

     

     

    Surveys show that across the UK, nearly 750,000 people aged 16 to 29 now regularly watch birds, an increase of 1,088 per cent since 2018. Across the seas in the United States, nearly one in three Americans now participate in some form of birdwatching.

    It’s likely that none of this would have happened without the spurring on of technology. The Merlin Bird app is especially popular. Developed by Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, the app simply needs a user to upload a photograph or record the call of an unseen bird, which it then uses to pinpoint the exact species. Similarly, the eBird app makes notes of all sightings, maintains personal lists and reveals what has recently been seen in particular places, by the birder community. MYNA, or Mapping Your Neighbourhood Avifauna,  explores bird data across districts, protected areas, localities and custom boundaries. In this way, birding has become an intrinsic part of a vast citizen-science database.

    The Great Backyard Bird Count is a sort of citizen census, drawing upon volunteers to submit checklists of feathered friends; India, amongst the most enthusiastic participants globally, submitted nearly 65,000 checklists from more than 27,000 hotspots, recording around 1,093 species. In quite the same way, Bird Count India works with citizen scientists to turn everyday observations into useful ecological information.

     

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    Although it may appear that India’s birding culture is tech-focused and therefore rather new, bird enthusiasts have existed for centuries, stretching as far back as the Mughals, who were known to be keen observers of the natural world. 
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    Equally accessible are the bird podcasts flooding the e-airwaves. The actor Sean Bean’s Get Birding With Sean Bean might be the most popular one simply by virtue of his career, but in India, Bird Nerds and Bird Podcast with Shoba Narayan are the podcasts that help bring birding into the average home. Bird Nerds explores Indian birds through their calls, habitats, behaviour and peculiarities, while Narayan’s podcast has focused on Indian species and the conservation challenges surrounding them.

    Although it may appear that India’s birding culture is tech-focused and therefore rather new, bird enthusiasts have existed for centuries, stretching as far back as the Mughals, who were known to be keen observers of the natural world.
    India’s interest in birds predates modern apps and social media by centuries. Emperor Jahangir was,perhaps the most interested of all, commissioning detailed paintings of birds. At one point, an official even presented him with a turkey purchased in Goa from Portuguese traders – a painting was immediately commissioned, and exists to this day. Jahangir, besotted, wrote a long description of the bird.

    “One of the animals was larger in body than a peahen and significantly smaller than a peacock. Sometimes when it displays itself during mating it spreads its tail and its other feathers like a peacock and dances. Its beak and legs are like a rooster’s. Its head, neck, and wattle constantly change color. When it is mating, they are as red as can be—you’d think it had all been set with coral. After a while these same places become white and look like cotton. Sometimes they look turquoise. It keeps changing color like a chameleon. The piece of flesh it has on its head resembles a cock’s comb. The strange part about it is that when it is mating, the piece of flesh hangs down a span from its head like an elephant’s trunk, but then when it pulls it up it stands erect a distance of two fingers like a rhinoceros’ horn. The area around its eyes is always turquoise-colored and never changes. Its feathers appear to be of different colors, unlike a peacock’s feathers.”

    Emperor Jahangir, in other words, was a consummate birder.

    After him came a litany of colonial ornithologists, who were instrumental in recording India’s avian heritage (then hunting it out of the skies). But most crucial to modern Indian birding was the Birdman of India, Salim Ali, ornithologist par excellence. His work with the Bombay Natural History Society and his pivotal 1941 The Book of Indian Birds, showed an entire generation that birdwatching could be a fun and accessible pursuit.

    It certainly helps that India has an extraordinarily varied geography, each with its endemic flora and fauna. Equally enthralling is the fact that every year, migratory birds arrive from Central Asia and Europe, transforming wetlands, grasslands and coastlines into temporary gathering places for species travelling thousands of kilometres. Every year in Mumbai, for instance, a gush of pink flamingos settle in Mumbai’s creeks, drawing a flock of round-eyed visitors.

     

     

    And this is the big magnet then. That a casual birdwatcher can just stand about at their window, go to the nearby park, walk down the street or sit in their building compound to work their hobby. It requires no great brain power, no feats of physical skill. Au contraire, the avid birder can choose to travel to any number of bird destinations such as Keoladeo National Park in Bharatpur,  Gujarat’s Nalsarovar and Thol, the wetlands of Kerala, the Western Ghats, the Himalayan foothills and the forests of Central India. All they would need are a pair of binoculars, and / or a camera.

    Nature tourism has cottoned on quick. An entire economy is now shaping up with guided walks and trekking companies, wildlife lodges and photography groups, podcasts and informal birding communities. Pugdundee Safaris, for example, offers a five-day Joy of Birding: Beginners Foundation Course at Kanha Earth Lodge, introducing participants to field observation, bird calls, behaviour and habitat interpretation.

    The internet has conditioned us to expect something new every few seconds. Birding operates differently. You might spend ten minutes watching a tree before anything appears. Sometimes the reward is a rare species. Sometimes it is simply learning to recognise a call you had never noticed before.

  • Posing With The Page

    For those of us who grew up reading, the idea of reading as performance is ludicrous. Writers standing on a soapbox and reading from their texts for a rapt audience? Of course. Reading as part of a book club? That is to be expected. But for the rest of us, we picked up a book, sat in a park, and just got on with it.

    So why is social media now castigating us for reading publicly? Are we meant to hunch under the covers and read with a flashlight, scurrying away if someone perchance discovers us? Reel upon reel unravels on our timelines, and thinkpiece after thinkpiece satirizes the curious affectations of the performative reader.

    This particular accusation is born of a very particular moment in time.

    On the one hand, Booktok and Bookstagram has flared interest in books. In the UK, romance, romantasy and speculative fiction sales rocketed up by 6% in 2025, thanks in large part to Booktok. Simultaneously, literary tourism is swelling, with reading retreats one of 2026’s biggest travel trends. This includes everything from traveling to real-world locations from novels, touring writers’ homes and museums, joining literary walking tours, attending book festivals, booking multi-day ‘readaway’ retreats, hunting down beloved independent bookshops, and traveling with book clubs. Every celebrity worth their salt has started a book club, including Emma Watson and Reese Witherspoon. Dua Lipa’s newsletter often includes recommendations for books she has enjoyed.

     

     

     

    On the other hand, we are told ad nauseum that reading rates have plummeted. North America is facing unprecedented levels of illiteracy; federal data reveals that the thought of reading a book for pleasure is abhorrent to most of us. Attention spans are hurtling rapidly downwards, losing out in the face of gaming and (you guessed it) social media. For some of us reading this, our attention might have already atrophied, our eyes pulled away towards the latest reel offered by Instagram’s canny algorithm.

    But what if the reel is about reading? About books? A reel about someone reading books? Surely that can only be a good thing?

    Amongst the accusations leveled at performative readers is the insincerity, the idea that they are reading not to enrich their own selves but as an appeal for social validation; reading as a flex, if you will. It’s impossible to argue with this when you read reports of Gwyneth Paltrow hiring book curators to choose books to fill her bookshelves.

    Simultaneously, we are inundated with pieces about color-coding your library; Caroline Bullough, chief sub-editor, at UK’s House and Garden has gone on record to say, “I love the sense of order that comes from colour-coded shelves arranged by book size. Things started well when we moved into this house. A neat row of orange Penguin fiction, another of blue Penguin factual, one shelf of small white paperbacks above one of larger white, and a carefully arranged shelf of hardbacks in their crisp, colourful covers graduating from lightest to darkest…”. At the other end of the color spectrum, the author Hanya Yanagihara has been quoted in the Guardian as saying “Anyone who arranges their books by colour doesn’t truly care what’s in the books.”

     

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    Attention spans are hurtling rapidly downwards, losing out in the face of gaming and (you guessed it) social media. For some of us reading this, our attention might have already atrophied.
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    Reading is meant to be an intellectual activity, expected to enrich one’s empathy, transporting the reader to different times, cultures, lifestyles; it is a smart person’s hobby, one that bolsters our memory, interiority and critical thinking powers. The advantages of reading have been dinned into us all our lives. Using books as a prop, or reading as a purely aesthetic activity curdles all of that.

    The strong suggestion made here also is that certain books are seen as pretentious or too mainstream. Is a reader lugging around Dostoevsky’s Notes From the Underground or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness being performative? Can the same accusation be levelled at someone reading Chetan Bhagat’s One Night at the Call Center: A Novel? If the answer is no, then we may need to scrutinize why we place certain books on a public pedestal, and sequester others away for a private read.

    This critique also follows in the wake of a slew of reports that social media’s attention is tilting away from perfectly coiffed and made-up influencers to content creators with deep knowledge in their fields, whatever those may be. These creators are bricking a brand around themselves by simply talking passionately about the most erudite subjects that they have spent years studying and working on. Nothing is staged for the ‘gram, and their looks are besides the point; their brains are.

     

     

    Whichever end of the discussion you stand on though, it’s undeniable that the same platforms that we eye askance are also responsible for pulling book-talk into the mainstream in a way that niche literary magazines never could. That it flattens as well as promotes is unsurprising. But if this is the way to get new readers in the door, it’s a price worth paying.