Payal Dhar

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.

City snapshots from across the SilkAir network (published in Silkwinds, the inflight print magazine).

Rarely before has a technology showered us with such conveniences that we have choreo-graphed our entire lives around it. And now this virtual digital network has a foot in our physical space as well. We call it the Internet of Things (IoT).

When a book claims to be a ‘reportage on rape from the world’s largest democracy’, you know that this isn’t one you are going to curl up with on a weekend. So let’s get the unpleasantries out of the way—you got it right, Priyanka Dubey’s collection of violence isn’t an easy read.

As creators, we have no control over how a reader, viewer or listener may interpret our work. On the other hand, as the recipient of that content, we can only experience it within our particular context, irrespective of the creator’s intent.

Bollywood and a brief dalliance with boy bands in my misspent, angsty teenage years more or less sum up my understanding of music. So when I found myself on a guided tour of the IME in Bengaluru just days after it opened, I felt a bit like a boiled sweet in a Godiva box. My tour guides were Manasi Prasad, a noted Carnatic vocalist and the museum director, and Dr Suma Sudhindra, a well-known veena player and the museum’s director of outreach programmes.

ENID BLYTON MADE me a feminist at the age of six. At seven she convinced me that I had to be an author. It would be many years, decades even, before I could articulate the disquiet that my favourite author’s stories stirred in me, and the connection between that feeling and my current profession. She may have had a contrary way of going about it, but I can’t not give her credit for setting me down the path of rebellion.

Certain cultural norms play to the advantage of queer travelers to India. Keep them in mind for a hassle-free trip.
It is generally accepted that clichés often have an element of truth to them. This holds in the case of India too. You won’t necessarily find elephants and snake charmers jostling for elbow room in the city (probably), but you can expect contradictions that boggle the mind. Here, various aspects of diversity intersect in a web so layered and complex that even natives struggle to get their heads around it...

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...

[Published on Divamag.co.uk] 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. Holby City’s Serena Campbell and Bernie Wolfe, or #Berena, went on to become—until it crashed and burnt—an iconic portrayal of a mature lesbian relationship on television.

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 ...