There is a map on a wall at the United Nations Environment Programme headquarters in Nairobi that shows the surface water bodies of the world — rivers, lakes, reservoirs, wetlands — and tracks what has happened to them over the past sixty years. It is not a comfortable map to look at. Surface water is […]
Andhra Pradesh is a state where festivals are not calendar events; they are the rhythm of daily life. This is a state where the Telugu New Year (Ugadi) is greeted before sunrise with a ritual oil bath, a six-taste dish that philosophically accepts both joy and sorrow as equal parts of existence, and the public […]
Vietnamese food is one of the most sophisticated and most misunderstood culinary traditions in the world. Outside Vietnam, it tends to get reduced to pho and spring rolls — and while both are extraordinary, they represent perhaps five percent of what this cuisine actually contains. Vietnamese cooking is built on a philosophy of balance: the […]
Kanyakumari sits at the very tip of India — the southernmost point of the subcontinent where the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean converge in a single body of water visible from the shore. It is the only place in India where you can watch the sun rise and set over […]
America’s festival calendar is as contradictory and as layered as the country itself. The same land where Mardi Gras has been disrupted, banned, and revived across three centuries of colonial rule; where Burning Man rises and vanishes on desert land that Indigenous peoples were forcibly removed from; where Coachella draws 250,000 people to a valley […]
Chandigarh has an unusual superpower among Indian cities: it sits almost perfectly positioned for Himalayan escapes. Le Corbusier’s meticulously planned city — India’s only planned post-independence capital — is approximately 50 km from the Shivalik foothills, 115 km from Shimla, 300 km from Manali, and within a long weekend’s reach of some of the finest […]
At 2,100 metres (6,890 feet) above sea level, Chembra Peak is the highest peak in the Wayanad district of Kerala — and one of the most rewarding treks in the entire Western Ghats. But it is not the summit that most trekkers talk about. It is the heart-shaped lake (Hridayathadakam) that sits midway along the […]
Alaska does not do anything halfway — including its festivals. This is a state where the summer sun refuses to set for weeks, where winter brings darkness so deep that people create their own light with fireworks and art, where the Indigenous cultures of dozens of distinct groups have been holding celebrations for thousands of […]
Rameswaram is a small island at the southern tip of India — connected to the mainland by the Pamban Bridge, separated from Sri Lanka by the Palk Strait, and positioned at the intersection of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. It is also one of the holiest sites in Hinduism. As one of […]
For centuries, the Ancient Silk Road connected some of the world’s greatest civilizations, stretching thousands of kilometres from China to Europe. It wasn’t a single road but a vast network of trade routes where merchants carried silk, spices, tea, precious stones, porcelain, and countless other goods across deserts, mountains, and kingdoms. Along with trade came […]