The Times of India • 18th June 2023

Tote bags, T-shirts & trinkets: Queer-run businesses move beyond rainbow cliches

As June rolls in, so does an influx of rainbow-themed goodies everywhere. While the queer community could do with visible support, it is also the first to remind you that Pride Month isn't just about the all-colour spectrum. A new wave of queer entrepreneurs are trying to redefine rainbow capitalism with ventures that reflect their identities beyond rainbow cliches.Last weekend a two-day showcase at BKC called 'Queer Made' amplified businesses and products owned and created by India's queer community.

The Times of India • 28th May 2023

How Pakistan uses 'honeytraps' to gain sensitive info

The latest DRDO case shows how the game has changed. Instead of seductive temptresses in shady hotel rooms, traps are laid through social media

The Times of India • 14th May 2023

Why Indian screenwriters are watching Hollywood writers strike

While streaming has changed the way we consume content, screenwriters say some things haven’t changed — their compensation, lack of credits or the lopsided contracts. A battle is raging in America’s Tinseltown. For the first time in 15 years, the Writers Guild of America (WGA ) launched an industry-wide strike demanding fair pay and benefits rather than being treated like gig workers. In a spillover effect, writers guilds across the world united to fight back, including India’s Screenwriters Association.

The Times of India • 13th May 2023

Can India’s grandest cultural centre become its finest?

Amid the grey, glassand-steel skyscrapers of Mumbai’s BKC, there is now a jolt of colour. The Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre ( NMACC ), an arts and culture hub that opened last month, is a kaleidoscope of buildings with three overarching gold leaves and a lotus motif running through it. Just as its building has injected colour into the sterile landscape many hope Mumbai’s newest cultural playground will spark a new sense and standard of patronage for the arts.

The Times of India • 24th April 2023

Where some of India's most sexually adventurous people meet

Tired of living with shame and stigma, members of India’s growing kinkster community say they no longer want to live in the shadows

The Times of India • 20th March 2023

Meet the 14-year-old who Bill Gates wants as his bridge partner

A ‘minor’ sensation in the sport, Anshul Bhatt has been playing competitive bridge since he was seven years old. At 14, he has a slew of wins under his belt and has been winning praise and encouragement from the world’s best.

The Times of India • 14th March 2023

How Indian artists are using AI, AR to let creativity soar

Would Impressionists like Monet and Renoir have existed had it not been for the invention of the portable paint tubes that allowed them to escape the studio, take inspiration from the world outdoors and experiment with new lightfast pigments invented by industrial chemists in the 19th century? What would have become of the ‘60s pop art movement had Andy Warhol not discovered silkscreen printing, the process of transferring images from magazines or newspapers to canvas?

The Times of India • 10th March 2023

New gallery at UK museum gives voice to South Asian diaspora

England’s 130-year-old Manchester Museum — built during the height of the British colonial rule in India — reopened this month following an ambitious £15 million transformation with a new South Asia Gallery of objects and personal possessions such as these to “acknowledge, interrogate and address” that complex history.

The Times of India • 5th March 2023

Guitar vs lathi: Indian buskers face the music

You hear them before you see them, and when you do, you’re likely to stop in your tracks and sing or tap along with these nameless street artistes or ‘buskers’, as they’re commonly called, who are increasingly livening up India’s public spaces. From parking lots, mall and metro gates to the likes of Delhi’s Connaught Place , Mumbai’s Carter Road or Bengaluru’s Church Street, buskers have been popping up and turning the street into their stage.

The Times of India • 5th March 2023

When the selfie chase goes too far

That the photograph is the new autograph is old hat now. Celebs, too, have adapted accordingly. But the average selfie hunt — no matter which celebrity is in it — can go much further in this age of ‘Pics or it didn’t happen’.

The Times of India • 19th December 2022

Can ChatGPT replace humans? Experiments reveal — not yet

Is it smart enough to plan your vacations? Can it make small talk on WhatsApp? Here’s what four Indian users found after spending quality time with the AI chatbot...

The Times of India • 19th December 2022

101-year-old silent classic revives legacy of Parsi magnate

The centrepiece of this year's edition of the week-long film preservation and restoration workshop by Film Heritage Foundation was a rare and fascinating gem: a lovingly restored 1921 movie 'Behula' - a silent film adapted from Bengali folklore Mansa Mangal - that saw the light of day last week, 101 years since it was made.

The Times of India • 4th December 2022

Would you stay in a murder house? | India News - Times of India

Would you rent Aftab’s flat or the Burari ‘house of horror’? Sunday Times tracks properties with an unsavoury history to find out if there are takers

Setting up a good quality path lab in Delhi was a dream for Mohan Singh Kashyap. He managed to set up one in 2014 in Sant Nagar but five years on, it was time for him to vacate. Crestfallen at first, he lucked out soon after on a “nice and spacious” three-storey bungalow that came with an empty ground floor to set up his lab again, a five-bedroom

The Times of India • 25th November 2022

Now Indian Art Index, a head-heart confluence, to help price artworks

To bring transparency to the “opaque” art market in India that has hobbled due to a lack of data or pricing models, Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIMA) along with Mumbai-based Aura Art Development , that provides art infrastructure solutions, launched a first-of-itskind ‘Indian Art Index’ on Thursday to help art collectors, new buyers and artists better understand the economic value of an artwork based on data instead of “a gut feeling”.

The Times of India • 13th November 2022

Old villas, ice factory make space for art, architecture & community

In its past avatar, it was a century-old East Indian family home that stood in the meandering lanes of Pali Village concealed behind Bandra ’s highrises.The Crastos’ ancestral bungalow has a similar vintage but is on the other side of town. Built in the 1890s in Khotachiwadi, it housed a printing press and functioned partly as a gym with the family living on the floor above. The third such spot is a 10,000 sq ft space in the dockyards of Ballard Estate, which was Mumbai’s oldest ice factory.

The Times of India • 23rd October 2022

Want to paint, write poetry, a novel: Bots at your service

Until a week ago, I was a regular journalist. Now, at the risk of sounding a little pretentious, I feel like I am quite the polymath. I made impressionist paintings in the style of Monet and Da Vinci one morning, spun poetry like Robert Frost and Edgar Allan Poe in the afternoon, scored a Hindustani classical bandish at sundown and wrote a short story with a Roald Dahl twist at night. It was all in a day’s work and barely arduous.

The Times of India • 16th October 2022

Crime banished, so's peace & quiet in buildings with police stations

Mumbai as a rule is noisy, chaotic, even eccentric. But for Mumbaikars sharing their home with cops, the quantum of sound and spectacle can be at a whole other level.The city has a handful of police stations-Pant Nagar, Nehru Nagar, Sakinaka, DN Nagar, Mulund , Chunabhatti, Govandi, Tardeo, RAK Marg-that operate out of apartments in residential buildings.

The Times of India • 11th October 2022

Big B: The voice that launched a thousand dreams

On superstar Amitabh Bachchan's 80th birthday, here’s a look at the rise and rise of an artiste who keeps reinventing himself and a key factor behind his box-office success

The Times of India • 2nd October 2022

First day, first show: Kashmir keeps its date with the movies

The lights dimmed, the projector cast its smoky white beam and for the first time in 33 years, friends and families in Kashmir found themselves united over popcorn and cola looking up at a ginormous screen to gaze at an oversized Hrithik Roshan and Saif Ali Khan sweeping them up into a dream of what life in Kashmir once was and what it once again could be.

The Times of India • 25th September 2022

Creative dissent that is now shaping the ‘Save Aarey’ protests

Last week, more than 90 students of Ruia Natyavalay — the college’s eight-decade-old theatre club — slipped into the skin of tribal forest dwellers to enact a “horror-thriller” titled ‘Are La Kare’ (tit for tat in Marathi) about a government officer chased around by a ghost that dwells in a tree that he is assigned to cut down.