‘Teach Urdu to kids’

For a visual artist, painting or photography are not a matter of creating pretty images, they are ways of awakening social consciousness Shiraz Husain is an independent artist and art educator. He is the founder of the popular Facebook page Khwaab Tanha Collective. A former assistant professor at the Department of Fine Arts, Jamia Millia […]

The food ambassador

Hugo Wang has devoted his life to popularising Taiwanese food in Delhi with the ‘right balance’ For the Indian palette Hugo Wang, 36, a chef who belongs to a reputed family of chefs from Taiwan, has a strange love for Delhi that defies logic. Sometimes, particularly in the case of Hugo, logic has its own […]

‘We need a Vriksha Bandhan’

Bharati Chaturvedi is the founder and director of Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group and is a prominent voice against the culling of trees in Delhi. Excerpts from an interview: Delhi, the world’s most polluted city, is rather keen to get rid of 16,500 trees to add more real estate. How can the world’s most […]

How clean is your closet?

‘People are not just wearing clothes, they are wearing dried blood, sweat and tears packaged in a fancy box of human misery’ Only a few sensitive souls choose to think about what goes into the making of the glamorous $3,000-billion fashion industry. Two of them are Carry Somers and Orsola de Castro. In 2013, the […]

2033: Not a drop to drink

This will be Delhi’s fate just 15 years from now. So says the NITI Aayog, and also cautions that ground water aquifers are drying up Delhi is looking into the face of disaster, where taps will run dry, and people will kill each other for a bucket of water. NITI Aayog’s most recent warning in […]

The cult of violence

Shujaat Bhukhari’s death carries with it the burden of all the human tragedies and ugly brutalities of a conflict The sight of Shujaat Bukhari’s metal coffin carried by a posse of men, amid the streaming rows of people walking in a procession on the narrow lanes of Kreeri, from his ancestral house to the graveyard […]

Dusty Delhi

Heat and dust of Delhi are real problems. All-pervasive dust has ensured Delhi remains the most polluted city in the world, whether it’s winter or summer. Is there a solution? Delhi remains the most polluted city of the world, irrespective of whether it’s winters or summers. This year has been uncharacteristically bad. Last week, a […]

Women-only pools?

The government has made a splash with new ideas to improve safety of women passengers who use Uber and Ola cabs. Patriot meets riders to find out pros and cons of the proposed features AT first, it seems like a good idea. Like ladies’ compartments in trains, women’s coaches in the Metro, and ladies’ special […]