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Love and the Little Green Man (Parade, August 2007) Reprint Rights: Reprint Rights: When All is NOT Lost (Dealing with Failure in College) I grabbed my coat, begged dad to loan me his car, and drove as fast as I could to college. As I anxiously walked through the gates, an emptiness in my stomach warned me of what was to come. I pushed along the crowded corridor to stand by the group of students eager to find out how they had fared. A glimpse of the notice board made my heart sink. The worst had happened. I had failed. Reprint Rights: Text by Mridu Khullar (Available) |
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Locals tell you how to stay cool in Ghana's equatorial capital. 
Venue? Check. Lehnga? Check. Jewellery? Check. Wedding cards? Check. Flower arrangements? Check. Detectives? Check that, too. AW investigates the latest trend in Indian Weddings. 
From the back cover:
The ladies-only train is a unique space. It is a market and a restaurant. It is the counselor's leather sofa. It is the movie without the ticket, the therapy without the bill. Women from all walks of life--rich and poor, religious and athiest, the burkha-clad housewife and the skirt-wearing college student-- share the feeling of security in this women-only space.
It's the same instinct of "feeling right" that drove Line, 48, to get up one September morning last year, dress in black jeans and a blue jumper, strap on her bags, and leave her home in Norway on a bicycle, to start a soul-searching journey through Europe and Asia.
Even in a rapidly developing India, arranged marriages remain popular. These days, brides and grooms often match up online and the first people in the screening process may be professional detectives, not parents.
Earning little more than Rs. 100 per show, they perform in small theatres, villages, local parks, even on the roadside. Their movements are perfectly coordinated, their dramatically delivered dialogues impressive. And it's only when you see the ropes placed strategically around the stage to demarcate the boundaries that you begin to question, that you look closer and realize-- almost all the performers in the troupe of Anyadesh are blind. 
Indian women often lose social standing and ties when their husbands die. But if widows are HIV-positive the stigma and isolation can be extreme. For the past few years, however, a marriage bureau in Gujarat helps some find new spouses. 
Walking down the busy Temple Road each morning, I'm greeted with familiar friendly faces-- monks going to or coming from their daily walks around the temple, shop owners setting up makeshift stalls on the side of the street, tourists sipping on their morning tea in small cafés, and little children on their way to school. In fact, so normal is the daily life of the people in McLeod Ganj, that it's easy to forget that this quaint little town in the Himalayas is at the centre of a freedom struggle. 
It may be an art in need of support, but puppetry isn't about to die out anytime soon. In fact, if anything, people are rediscovering their love for this fascinating art. And with the Indian adaptation of Sesame Street to hit television screens sometime soon, some might say, modern puppetry is just about finding its place in the heart of Indian audiences. 
Tens of thousands of lives lost. Many millions more rendered homeless. Thousands of families cramped into temporary shelters that were built to house survivors for a brief period. While the state and central governments may have declared the relief phase over, and the state machinery has entered into the rehabilitation mode of operation, people continue to live like refugees. In most places, the land for construction of permanent houses for survivors of the South Asian tsunami has yet to be identified, and there is little hope in the eyes of people who have lost homes, families and livelihoods that they will be able to call anything but these windowless blocks of land home again. 