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Kalpana Sunder
Kalpana Sunder
Kalpana Sunder is an independent journalist based in Chennai, India. She writes on travel, environment, gender, architecture, culture, lifestyle, food and fashion. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor, Al Jazeera and the National Geographic Traveler.

A new wave of mid-range retailers is capitalising on Japan’s reputation for quality goods, winning millennial and Gen Z fans seeking ‘practical, functional’ items.

Social media is awash with ways to protect your immune system – and one of the more recent to go viral on TikTok is #ImmunityCube. Experts break the trend down, and we provide an immunity cube recipe.

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Mel Robbins’ Instagram post on the ‘let them’ theory gained 14 million views in a week last year. It tells us not to obsess about what others do, and how we can control our own reaction to events.

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Harish Closepet has half a million followers on Instagram and is a MasterChef finalist. He is also an entrepreneur and engineer. He talks about making lunch for his daughters, and Indian stereotypes.

In our fast-paced lives, maybe we all could do with a Shultz hour – time to escape from our devices and the world outside and to ponder and process our thoughts in a state of “focused daydreaming”.

A start-up in India is enabling people to publish their families’ heirloom recipes and food memories ‘before it’s too late’, in colourful cookbooks that can be passed down through the generations.

Indian supper club House of Málà is giving Mumbai diners an introduction to Sichuan food, serving up some of the Chinese cuisine’s hot and numbing classic dishes along with stories about their origins.

Industry insiders say the Archie comics have long had a cultural impact in India, giving readers their first taste of American life and even influencing some Bollywood films.

How to lose weight? Doctor, YouTuber and stand-up comedian ‘Dr Pal’ uses humour to spread his message about fasting, eating mindfully and getting rid of excess belly fat.

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Alcohol-free travel companies such as Hooked and We Love Lucid are catering to a growing sober tourism trend driven by travellers looking for deeper experiences unclouded by booze and hangovers.

Idris Elba and Kevin Hart joined other celebrities, athletes, conservation heroes and thousands of locals at the annual Gorilla Naming Ceremony near Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park.

Indian chefs, from Goa to New Delhi, are coming up with creative ways to turn food that would otherwise be discarded into nutritious dishes as they promote zero-waste cooking in their restaurants and online.

Millennials and younger people appear to be taking more ‘praycations’, spiritual holidays, where they visit places of worship but add in elements of a luxury trip as well.

Railway tracks have suffered from years of lack of maintenance and are not built to accommodate the pressure of fast-moving trains that now ply the country.

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Chefs from New Delhi to Bangalore are responding to increasingly well-informed young Indians’ demand for healthy, sustainable fare by giving traditional regional dishes a modern twist.

Social media has been awash with bone broth recipes, touting its health benefits. Here is why veggie broth – without the bones – can be even more healthy.

Chicken Manchurian was created in the 1970s in Mumbai, by chef Nelson Wang, and today is the most popular ‘Chinese’ dish in India, found on every Indian Chinese restaurant menu.

The film, released in India on March 17, examines exploitation of the country’s gig workers, who are not protected by the government and have little or no job security.

The US is home to the second-largest diaspora of Indians living abroad, with as many as 4.2 million calling the country home, some of whom still carry the bias of the 3,000-year-old caste system.

A luxury homestay in a colonial bungalow on a coffee plantation in Karnataka offers a chance to see coffee harvested, visit temples and a nature reserve, and drink some of the stuff.

Cardamom, long used in Ayurveda – traditional Indian medicine – has many potential health benefits. We unlock nine health benefits of the spice.

Low cost, short waiting times, world-class infrastructure and skilled practitioners are some push factors for Chennai as a medical tourism hub, even as critics highlight neglect of services for lower-income citizens.

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India’s penchant for gold and high duties has made it a gold smuggling hotspot, confiscating more than 3,000kg of the precious metal in the first 11 months of 2022.