Category: Stories
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There’s no planet B. But, we have the Metaverse.
‘There’s no planet B. But, we have the Metaverse’, I said to a despairing friend who had just read Mike Berners-Lee’s handbook on planetary perils and solutions. I dreamt a magical life in the metaverse. I imagined whizzing from Bondi beach to my virtual office with a brief stop over in the Alps to experience…
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Longing to Travel?
Longing to Travel? A peek into a place most people overlook. We are frequent travellers. My husband and I take our kids to a new destination, every school holiday longer than a weekend. Typically we flock to the mountains and the backwaters to hear the sound of silence. We arm ourselves with anti-malarial tablets;…
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A canopy under threat | Why ecology must be prioritised over technology
Longing to Travel? As temperatures rise and the leafy cover diminishes, books, tree museums and non-profits show us why we must prioritise ecology over technology Our neighbour in Zürich waved me over one afternoon. At the garden fence separating our homes, he pointed to a certain plant in our backyard and explained that it was not…
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Why World Cultural Festival?
In the age of digital connectivity where everyone is connected to everyone else with a push of a button, the initial reaction to a world culture festival that brings millions of people together in one place to celebrate different cultures, was ambivalent to me. A television broadcast would reach millions more with lesser effort, was…
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Minimal Living, Maximal Values
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Moments of Culture Shock for an Indian in Germany
We relocated as a family to Germany in July 2005. We chose a Wohnung (apartment) in a Dorf (village) close to Frankfurt as our home. Our second child was on her way and I was visibly pregnant. The initial months of settling down and adjusting to Deutschland were remarkable in many ways. There were moments of bewilderment and discomfort…
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Up the Downhill
It’s fair to say that the Himalayas were an integral part of my school days. They would rise to prominence just before the cyclic geography assessment in school and then fade into obscurity until the next academic evaluation loomed. Despite growing up in the subcontinent that housed the world’s highest peaks, I have to admit…
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The Rich Inheritance
The identical solitaires on either side of her nose sparkle. The cluster of diamonds in her ears compete to outshine them. Her shimmer would light up drab days, and the value of her jewels could’ve fetched a mansion in Manhattan. She was my grandmother. She was stellar.
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Offline, Off-the-Grid and into the Amazon: A Photoessay
Pre-trip The online retail giant Amazon overshadows the South American rainforest in Google’s first-page search results. Daily-deals comprising gadgets and books we didn’t seek vied for our attention to ‘add to the basket’ while we aspired the abundance of a tropical biome. Desperate to go beyond dot-com destinations, we tagged the word…
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Saturdays and the Art of Autoreinigung