Payal Dhar

Not everyone is lucky enough to see the Valley of Flowers in full bloom. First of all, as a high-altitude inner Himalayan valley, it remains inaccessible and under snow for most of the year. Second, it is not an easy trek—not just because of its altitude (around 3,500 metres above sea level) and the moderately difficult access route that involves negotiating a glacier, but also because it is a trip that needs to be taken in the rainy season, over wet and slippery forested paths, some perilous...

In a bizarre twist to a plot that didn’t exist, the hospital soap Holby City decided to “bury a gay” it had already written out months ago. In the 30 July episode “Things My Mother Told Me”, a group of mostly strangers bid farewell to the immensely popular lesbian character, the ex-army trauma surgeon Bernie Wolfe, played by Jemma Redgrave.

Scientists have searched for a sustainable aviation fuel for decades. Now, with emissions from air traffic increasing faster than carbon-offset technologies can mitigate them, environmentalists worry that even with new fuel-efficient technologies and operations, emissions from the aviation sector could double by 2050. But what if, by 2050, all fossil-derived jet fuel could be replaced by a carbon-neutral one made from sunlight and air?

What we eat, how we eat it, when, why, and where—the fundamental questions while writing any explorative or journalistic food piece—deeply inform our ways of life, varying widely across the globe. Yet in a world where the lens belongs to the white Western commentator, food too is experienced with an Orientalist bias. “I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion that a lot of food writers pretend to know a lot more than they actually do when it comes to…let’s call it ‘ethnic’ food,” wrote...

In India, the government of Delhi is rolling out an ambitious video surveillance program as a crime-prevention measure. Technicians will install more than a quarter million closed-circuit TV (CCTV) cameras near residential and commercial properties across the city, and in schools.

We are an overwhelmingly ableist society — we see disability or neuro-divergence as a lack or absence that makes an individual ‘inferior’ and keeps them from having a fulfilling life as defined by mainstream values. Plus, most of us still tend to use problematic terminology in referring to disability, and there is almost zero integration or accessibility in public spaces, mainstream schools, and higher-education institutions. We have internalised ableism as the norm, disability as a ‘deviation'.

Hill stations, a quaint term for the holiday destinations in or near the mountains, are a colonial legacy that India is quite happy to retain. They were created in the early 19th century, when British expatriates unaccustomed to or made ill by India’s heat began to seek out cooler air. (Despite the name hill stations, most of these destinations are at mountainous altitudes.) The colonial rulers established pockets of England in once-remote Indian settlements — usually to the detriment of the local populations...

The year is 2019 and it’s a really difficult time to be a heterosexual person. As television producers trample over each other in their haste to stick rainbows on their respective shows, the hysterical lesbians and gays stand poised to disrupt the peace the moment one of their their stories – which is all the stories these days – goes south. Straight people’s stories are now the most dispensable on television. Where is a heterosexual supposed to go to find their happily-ever-afters?

Following a trail of suspicious digital crumbs left in cloud-based systems across South Asia, Kaspersky Lab’s security researchers have uncovered a steganography-based attack carried out by a cyberespionage group called Platinum. The attack targeted government, military, and diplomatic entities in the region.

The TL;DR version: I did not like the ending of The Big Bang Theory. Sheldon’s sudden epiphany about his “other family” was reductive, and what happened with Penny (pregnancy) and Amy (makeover) were downright offensive. Read on for the meandering version or skip straight to the comments to vent (or to disagree with me).

Taking up space isn’t something women are conditioned to do. Almost 20 years into the 21st century and we still have fight for every inch. Then an extraordinary woman strides on to our TV screens and shows us how to do it. You simply claim your place, she tells us. You do not wait for it to be offered and you definitely not ask for it. That’s Anne Lister of Shibden Hall, Halifax, for you – landowner, industrialist, mountaineer, writer, lover of women – as portrayed in Gentleman Jack.

It is wholly possible that I wrote my first fan fiction in the 1980s. That makes my uppity attitude towards it later in life rather hypocritical, though I plead being seven years old as my defence. Back then—that is, in those pre-internet days—writing myself into a variety of fictional realities, and sometimes playing them out in secret or with the sibling, didn’t seem like any particular political statement.

As new security technologies shield us from cybercrime, a slew of adversarial technologies match them, step for step. The latest such advance is the rise of digital doppelgängers—virtual entities that mimic real user behaviors authentic enough to fool advanced anti-fraud algorithms.

The British rulers of colonial India loved to ‘summer’ in Mussoorie. Evidence of their occupation is still visible in the architecture they left behind, and in the names of the streets, buildings and even mountains.

Returning to what was once home, not even Grace is certain if she’s here for her mother’s funeral or if she's running from a marriage she no longer feels part of. If it’s escape that she has come looking for, then the fates have other ideas—in the form of a hitherto-unknown older sister born with Down’s who has spent her life in an institution, and a palatial but isolated beach house in Madras.