Payal Dhar

Take some classic sci-fi movies and a couple of popular first-person shooter games, and add an artist who also designs fine jewelry. What do you get? Well, that was a trick question because what you get is something that defies categorization. But if we must quantify it, you might come up with Celtic-geek-vintage jewelry, what Omer Nainudel creates.
Since Omer’s custom jewelry shop, Alien Forms Jewelry, opened on Etsy in 2016, he’s designed hundreds of beautiful, bizarre pieces. With rings, b...

Holby City gives Payal Dhar a horrible feeling of deja vu…
Getting under your skin is the hallmark of a good story. When that story seeps into the lives of people across borders and cultures, it’s an indication that there’s something monumental afoot. Something monumental is exactly what happened when two middle-aged women kissed in a British TV series.

Back in the 1980s, going to the bank with my grandmother was about the most tedious part of my summer holidays in Calcutta. It was only the promise of tiffin cake afterwards that kept me from whining my way through the whole outing. Whiz forward in time to the present — my eight-year-old nibling has probably never even seen the inside of a bank, because, as far as they know, money comes from an ATM.
We love to marvel at how technology has radically changed our lives in the last decade or so, ...

There is a certain timelessness about the ocean that probably explains watchmakers’ affinity to it. This attraction to the wide blue expanse has inspired timepieces for generations, and continues to do so to this day.
Among the ocean-themed watches released in 2018 is Rolex’s Sea-Dweller Deepsea D-Blue, an addition to its professional diver’s range. It commemorates Canadian filmmaker and diver James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenge in 2012, when he navigated a submersible device to the bottom of t...

A tea lover goes on a coffee retreat. Sounds like an oxymoron at best, the opening bars of a tired joke at worst. Coffee is no laughing matter in Chikmagalur, though. They take the beverage very seriously in these parts, nowhere more so than at The Serai. For starters, the resort is run by the Coffee Day group, a fact you are reminded of almost diffidently as you turn in at the gates. The bigger surprise is when you find yourself plunging into the heart of a coffee plantation.
India’s coffee ...

Twenty-five days after Section 377 was scrapped, millennial denizens tell us how similar or different it is when travelling within India and overseas as a gay couple. While some responses may surprise you, others will be like reading your personal diary. By Payal Dhar

It’s almost a cliché to call India a land of contradictions. In the context of travel, this paradox gives India a reputation both for its hospitality and for being unsafe for certain travellers. Primers have been written about h...

In a digital world interspersed with dark and dangerous corners, blockchain technology provides a ray hope with its promise of security and transparency. (Special to Financial Chronicle)

‘The foot was relaxed. The human was happy too.’ There is something unarguably lost in translation, but this sign outside a massage parlour in Taipei on my last evening was quite apt. I had set off for Taiwan with a sense of jumping in with my eyes closed, but I came back with a sense of an adventure had.
Taiwan is a smallish country — off the southeast coast of China — measuring less than 400 kilometres tip to toe. Most of this distance you can cover in about ninety minutes thanks to the Hig...

The luxury lifestyle doesn’t exactly shout “sustainable”. In fact, an Oxfam report from 2015 says, “The average (carbon) footprint of the richest 1 per cent of people globally could be 175 times that of the poorest 10 per cent.” So when we hear about a top-of-the-line catamaran, our instinct is to wonder how many villages it could power for the next decade. But then, it’s quite unfair to paint all luxury tech with the same tainted brush. A fact exemplified by Daedalus Yachts, whose zero-emiss...

Writing for children demands the best and the freshest of a writer’s imagination, backed by a high degree of editorial skill. The listed books are good reads and tackle a variety of themes, but in the meld of originality, ideas, and narrative skill, they fall short. We looked for empathy rather than discrimination, fun rather than instruction, audacity rather than political correctness, wonder rather than world-weary ennui — and came away disappointed. We didn’t find the quality of timelessne...

The easiest way to make a teenager disappear is probably to hiss “historical fiction” at him or her. One could blame the education system for making history a litany of names, dates and what places used to be called before they became the places we know. Or, one might shake a fist at the drab, didactic fare that exists in the name of historical fiction in India. Which is what makes Devika Rangachari’s book stand out like a bar of rich dark chocolate in a bowl of celery sticks.
The Australian ...

Den Gamle By in Denmark is a town that harks back to the time of writer Hans Christian Andersen with Victorian homes, shops and people representing the bygone era. Payal Dhar experiences the pleasures of the 1800s.
History seeps out of Denmark’s every pore — from the moment you get off at the Copenhagen Central Station to every time you walk down the streets of its well-known towns. But nothing else catapults you right into the middle of it as Den Gamle By in the heart of Århus — an open-air ...