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Climate Change and Alternate Realms – An Interview with Gigi Ganguly

By Monisha Raman When doomsday strikes, will humans find an alternate world? Will genome banks come to our rescue? Will there be missions across space to find a suitable home? How will such societies on a perpetual search be structured? Gigi Ganguly’s Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World is a collection of speculative stories that depict humanity’s complex relationship with…

The Tree is a Poet

By Andal Srivatsan Nature and poetry have been linked for centuries before the genesis of the term romanticism. While the proverbial connotation of romance is rooted in love, attraction, and a deep sense of belonging, romantic poets wrote about striking rural landscapes as a source of joy. Alfred Tennyson’s The Brook quotes the brook itself. It is human, delicate, undaunted…

The Treasure Highland: A Conversation with Godwin Vasanth Bosco

Lagoons throughout the world are threatened by the capitalistic ambitions of states and international territorial disputes, yet literature on them is missing an intimate portrayal akin to Nan Shepherd’s work on mountains or Roger Deakin’s portrayal of the British Isles.

Maari

Of Culture and Nature

By Sangeetha Menon “Kanmani watched her village from the hill. The lands stood dry and bare, broken even. The skies stared back in defence as the sun growled.” These are the opening lines of Maari, a story about a village in Tamil Nadu dealing with severe drought and finding solace through culture. The young protagonist, Kanmani, is worried as she…

Back-to-Bharat-feature

Back to Bharat

Publisher: Penguin BusinessAuthor: Nagaraja Prakasam Back to Bharat: In Search of a Sustainable Future is a book that addresses the present economic dilemma for Indian entrepreneurs and consumers, looking at the past and present situation of both India and the developed world to find a way forward. Written in an engaging and anecdotal style, the book is enriched with case studies…

Tiger Collage Feature new

Big Cats in a Big Bad World

By JoAnne Saldanha With inputs from Meghaa Gupta Out of the 38 cat species across the planet, only six have the distinction of being called ‘big cats’: lions, tigers, leopards, snow leopards, jaguars and cheetahs. While they may look like oversized kitty cats, one of the main differences, other than size, between big cats and their smaller cousins is the…

Children book collage feature

Delving Beneath the Surface: Mining in Indian Children’s Books

By Archana Natraj India is the world’s second-largest coal producer and a major producer of bauxite, iron, and zinc ore. Extracting these ores offers significant economic benefits, but it comes at a cost – land-use change, deforestation, erosion, contamination of wetlands and carbon emission that affect the environment, the livelihood and social fabric of local communities. The coal and lignite…