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Every four to six months, 32-year-old freelance graphic designer Salvita Rozario shuts her laptop in Delhi and takes off — not for adventure, but to move slower than the city allows. “When you freelance, time can feel elastic,” she says. “Slow travel helps me stretch it with intention.”Her first real experiment with this was Jaipur in 2022. She stayed for two weeks with a college friend in Civil Lines — cycling to cafés like Curious Life and Tapri Tea House, sketching the peeling façades along MI Road, and wandering through Johri Bazaar on languid afternoons. “Jaipur taught me that slowing…

Headlines may hide more than they reveal; but straws in the wind often warn us about the storm ahead.The expiry of a key bilateral nuclear arms control pact between the US and Russia on Wednesday almost went unnoticed.Why? Is there more to it than meets the eye?See how, after 18 years of on-and-off negotiations, India and the European Union (EU) quickly signed the “Mother of All Trade Deals” on January 27, 2026. Within a week, US President Donald Trump also rediscovered his “friend” in Prime Minister Narendra Modi, piped down his high-tariff horse, and announced a bilateral trade agreement (BTA)…

Every instinct tells you to lean back.You’re standing at the top of a slope that drops away beneath you like the edge of the world, and every fibre of your being screams to press your weight into the mountain behind you. To hold on. To stay safe.And that’s exactly how you fall.Something biggerSkiing is perhaps the most counterintuitive sport ever devised. The first lesson any instructor will drill into you is this: lean downhill. Commit your weight forward, into the void, into the very thing that terrifies you. Lean into the mountain, and you lose your edges, your skis slide…

The M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru. | Photo Credit: K. MURALI KUMAR The High Court of Karnataka on Friday sought a response from the State government on the suggestion made by amicus curiae that certain measures indicated in the draft Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for crowd management could be incorporated in the proposed the Karnataka Crowd Control (Managing Crowd at Events and place of Gathering) Act, 2025.Senior Advocate S. Susheela, who is acting as amicus curiae in the PIL petition suo motu initiated by the court on the issue of stampede that occurred outside M. Chinnaswamy stadium on June 4,…

Gurdeep Lal flips through a small booklet issued to him in 2015 by the Haryana Building and Other Construction Workers Board, which lists 22 welfare schemes aimed at providing for every eventuality in life and also death. In the nine years that he has been enrolled with the programme, he laments, he has not been able to access any of these schemes.Mr. Lal, 39, belongs to the Baazigar community and runs a grocery store in Chapra village in Haryana’s Shahbad Assembly constituency. As a Scheduled Caste voter, he has emerged as a prime target for the major political parties in…

In vegetables, inflation was 6.78% in January as against deflation of 3.50% in December. | Photo Credit: PTI Wholesale price inflation extended upward momentum for the third straight month, at 1.81% in January, driven by an uptick in prices of food, non-food articles, and manufactured items on a month-on-month basis, government data showed on Monday (February 16, 2026). Wholesale Price Index (WPI)-based inflation was 2.51% in January last year, while in the previous month (December 2025), it was 0.83%.Also Read | What causes inflation in India: Demand or supply issues? | Data “Positive rate of inflation in January 2026 is…

USK captain Monank Patel in action against Namibia. | Photo Credit: R. RAGU The ICC T20 World Cup is the best chance for the emerging teams to show how much progress they have made in the two years since the previous edition. Unlike the ODI World Cup, which occurs every four years, the T20 World Cup is a biennial affair and is one tournament where the Associate nations have a good chance of surprising the full member teams.It hasn’t quite happened in this edition so far. Yes, Zimbabwe beat Australia, but they are not only a full member team, but…

A few years ago, Sunil Kaushik, an Indian innovation consultant, along with Japanese artist-writer Yuka Yokozawa, undertook an ambitious 500-day cycling journey from Thailand to Portugal. As they travelled across 17 countries and 38 borders, the duo faced numerous challenges, including getting lost in an Iranian desert, experiencing the 2016 Turkish coup attempt, and encountering a terrorist incident in Maçka, Turkey. However, the duo kept at it, and Yuka documented their travels in a memoir, Golden Hearts On The Road. Sunil Kaushik | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement “After completing our cross-continental journey, we settled in the forested region of Wayanad,…

Despite repeated humiliations, Pakistan is not done embarrassing itself on the world stage when it comes to Kashmir. Since 1990, on February 5 each year, Pakistan observes Kashmir Solidarity Day to show support and unity with the people of Jammu and Kashmir, attempting to present itself as the injured party in a dispute it has long reduced to propaganda.The smokescreen is one of showing solidarity with Kashmiri people, but what rarely enters these theatrics is the uncomfortable fact that the Kashmiris who actually live in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK) enjoy neither meaningful political power nor control over their own land and…

For representative purposes. The story so far: Bio-based chemicals are industrial chemicals produced using biological feedstocks like sugarcane, corn, starch, or biomass residues, often through fermentation or enzymatic processes. Examples include organic acids (such as lactic acid), bio-alcohols, solvents, surfactants, and intermediates used in plastics, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. Enzymes are biological catalysts widely used in detergents, food processing, pharmaceuticals, textiles, pulp and paper, and increasingly in biomanufacturing. Enzymes often work at lower temperatures and pressures, reducing energy use and emissions.Why does India need such chemicals?India has strong fundamentals for scaling bio-based chemicals and enzymes: a large agricultural base, deep expertise…