India Today

Spike Lee's remake of his first film as a Netflix series is perfectly suited to the zeitgeist coming in the midst of a slew of revelations about sexual assault in the supposedly post empowerment West. The She's Gotta Have It series centres, as the

Who is the voyeur in Voyeur? The obvious answer is Gerald Foos, a Colorado motel keeper who spent three decades spying on his guests through vents installed expressly for the purpose. But the man we meet first in this Netflix documentary is the celeb

It took just one performance of the Beijing Contemporary Dance Company (BCDC) in Delhi to convince Rukmini Chatterjee, a dancer and choreographer of 27 years' experience, that the future lies in India and China. "The power of their art forms, the ex

John Scheinfeld's documentary on jazz legend John Coltrane, Chasing Trane (newly released on Netflix), is a must watch for jazz fans. But be prepared to cringe a bit at Scheinfeld's clumsy filmmaking along this revelatory journey about one of the gre

A painter at work: he is sitting on the floor, a brush poised over a bare sheet of wasli paper, propped up on a knee. There's no colour anywhere in the canvas, except his full black beard and plain white clothes. Who is he? Right above him in Devanag

Actor Adil Hussain is a die hard optimist. Every time he opens an e mail with a script attached, he is looking for a chance to examine the nuances of life spurring personal as well as professional growth. His role in Mukti Bhawan where his performa

"We leap from one life into another, be it imperfectly, and hope? that the past does not catch up with us. But sometimes it does? Reminders of our discarded lives can not yet be completely blocked?" Anyone familiar with M.G. Vassanji's writing will k

Over the last year, Punjabi rapper Prabh Deep Sagar, 23, has emerged as the most distinctive voice in Delhi's hip hop scene. His accounts of the real life street thuggery, drug addiction and unemployment that pervade his middle class neighbourhood of

At first blush, Tushar Lall seems like most 22 year olds, fond of going out, hanging out with friends and playing the occasional game of tennis whenever time permits. But predictable is far from the prefix you would attach to his personality type. F

Akash Manoj had not heard of 'silent' heart attacks till his grandfather passed away. He vowed to invent a device that would help people at risk. Two years of hard work later, he unveiled a prototype of his device earlier this year, winning recognit

There was a time when global cola or shoe companies vying for a spot in the Indian market couldn't look beyond the 'gentleman's game' when it came to advertising. Cut to 2017, the streets are now taken over by rap singers, hip hop dancers and artists

Khirkee, in south Delhi, has long been a hyperdense, diverse neighbourhood, peopled mainly by migrants and refugees. Which is why the four day Khirkee Festival, from December 14 17 celebrates that multicultural vibe with the works of artists from Nig

If you have the talent, degrees are immaterial. No one proves it better than Trishneet Arora of Ludhiana. The company he founded four years ago, TAC Security, is now a multi million dollar one, and counts among its clients the governments of four co

When Ishaan Jajodia first set up his website, The Mumbai Art Collective (TMAC), in June 2016, it was a bid to create an art repository that did justice to Indian art and heritage. He soon realised that the repository in itself would not provide conte

Sreelakshmi Suresh was introduced to the digital world when she was a child, and founded her company, Edesign Technologies, when she was just 10, becoming one of the youngest CEOs in the world. Today, her company has more than 300 clients the world

Much before the launch of the now famous learning applications, Nadkarni had created Examify, an app designed to help students prepare for exams the smart way. The idea was to bust the myth that test taking was the only way students could succeed. A

Started in 2015 as an initiative to make society more inclusive for senior citizens and to help them connect to the younger generation, Aanchal Gupta stumbled upon the idea of Pitaara while pursuing her Gandhi Fellowship Programme in Mumbai. "The in

The idea behind 'Backyard' stemmed from the thesis projects in their final year at School of Architecture and Planning, Anna University. Akshaya's thesis, 'Musings of the Mind' was a concept to create a space that provoked co ideation and collaborat

When Arjun Sawhney, 17, and Jessy Jindal, 18, twelfth grade students at The Shri Ram School, Gurugram, decided to float an entrepreneurial venture, they chose one that would have a huge social impact. FeedOn, which makes good quality, fresh food ava

It was a school presentation on World Environment Day in 2015 highlighting the water wastage issue that made Garvita Gulhati and her classmate, Pooja Tanawade, think more deeply about the problem. They started the social initiative, 'Why Waste?', ho

Seven months after Yash Sanghvi and Archit Sanadhya launched OLI, a YouTube channel run by the NSS division of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 2015 in Mumbai, they had only 100 subscribers. Today, it has more than 330,000, mostly stude

In 2015, Google Inc. and India's Department of Information Technology launched a designathon to create a new public interface for the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) MyGov.in. For user interface designer and aspiring entrepreneur Raghav Sarin and his

Locatera is my humble attempt to 'Uber ise' school transport management systems," says its developer Arjun S., a student at the Velammal Vidhyashram School in Chennai. "It is also an attempt to democratise the traditional tools and technologies bein

The brutal killing of Afrajul Khan by Shambhunath Raigar at Rajsamand, Rajasthan, recorded by his nephew and advertised on social media with pride by the perpetrators, raises certain fundamental questions. Had identities been reversed, had the killer

From a very early age, Aanchal Sukhija used to get vexed at how flippant people were about garbage recycling and reducing their carbon footprint. Indeed, the fact that people discarded everyday household articles without a thought to the havoc it wa

TIKI TAKA HARYANA STYLE Transfers of bureaucrats have long been a handy weapon of reprimand in the hands of chief ministers. And Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar seems to be using it to good effect in his state. Babus in his government say

History was in the making as six science students, all part of Chennai based organisation Space Kidz India, which works to provide Indian students international exposure in space science, participated in the Cubes in Space global contest earlier this

With her dad running the Residency Hotel in Bhopal, Komal had grown up knowing the ins and outs of the hospitality business. So after a Masters in International Business from the Hult International Business School in San Francisco in 2015, it was in

Working with a travel company in Udaipur in 2015, Bhawani Singh Chandela and Dushyant Singh Jhala, classmates from Ajmer's Mayo College, realised that every tour they led was to the touristy place predictable and boring. So when a British couple ins

In May this year, chief information commissioner R.K. Mathur said the Central Information Commission (CIC) was working to clear all RTI appeals filed in 2015 by September 2017, and those filed in 2016 by end 2017. But even as he races against a self

Artwhoring, Priyanka Paul's immensely popular Instagram account, is about "starting and perpetuating discussions through art". The illustrator, poet and social media influencer says it is through art that she best expresses herself, especially on the

No Sex, We're Indian On December 11, Smriti Irani's information and broadcasting ministry told TV channels not to broadcast advertisements for condoms between six in the morning and 10 at night because they "could be indecent/ inappropriate for viewi

Anoyara Khatun was trafficked from her village Choto Asgara in West Bengal at the age of 12 and escaped to start her mission of saving children from the region. In 2007, on a rainy night in her village, as children poured out of homes to save a girl

Kumari Kashish switched off the lights in her dormitory and sat in silence conjuring up Rozy, the character she was going to play in Sheroes, the annual play by Salaam Baalak Trust (SBT) that won her the Rashtrapati Award for acting this year. Kashi

The idea of Blee Tech Innovations goes back to when classmates Janhavi Joshi and Nupura Kirloskar were studying at the Maharashtra Institute of Technology, Pune, and had to work on solutions for niche users. "We selected the problem of deaf dancers,

Nepal's 'Left alliance' has swept to a commanding victory in the historic federal and provincial elections that concluded on December 7. The precise parliamentary arithmetic won't be known for a few more days, but already it's clear that much of the

Jai Chand is from a small village, Bhangadi, 90 km from Nahan in Himachal Pradesh. A Class 11 student of Government Senior Secondary School, Sirmour, in Himachal Pradesh, he has single handedly planted more than 200 walnut, apple, peach, pear and deo

Bertil Lintner has a formidable reputation as a journalist who has extensively explored what Nari Rustomji called our enchanted frontiers our northeastern borderlands. His observations of the region are informative and balanced. His latest book, titl

Beijing's mandarins like to describe relations with Pakistan as "all weather". But in recent weeks, the sunny forecast has turned to a rare bout of stormy weather. On December 8, the Chinese embassy in Islamabad issued a public warning, saying "terro

Shraddha Sharma is credited as being one of the first Indian artists to gain popularity through her soulful renditions of popular tracks in Punjabi on YouTube. The one that sparked it all off was the Punjabi song 'Main Tenu Samjhawan', when she was

Cryptocurrency Bitcoin has created the biggest bubble since the internet. There are 16.7 million bitcoins now in existence, valued at over $267 billion at their price at the time of writing ($16,000 apiece). For perspective, the total value of rupees

Mallika Arya always loved to travel, but never got a chance until college. "My parents gave me enough freedom and trusted me enough to let me go anywhere I wanted to, but on one condition I had to earn the money myself," she says. So Arya worked and

It all began in 2012 at the end of their junior college year at Thakur college in Kandivali East in Mumbai, when Singh's neighbour, a small time director, called him and Jha to act in a video he was making. Both were excited about being on camera, a

Sound of music Primal The Bar Vibe A unit of The Smoke Co, the new concept restaurant that serves smoked and cured meats, Primal The Bar comes as no surprise, for there is a bit of smoke in everything you drink and eat here. However, unlike The Sm

Sreerupa Chowdhury always wanted to be Atticus Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird taking up cases for those who lacked the ability and know how. Her crusade began when she was preparing to attend an anti corruption conference in Brazil in 2012 and the

I once saw a friend struggling to ask for a condom at a chemist shop," says Sirhaan Seth, 19, who is giving the word sexting a whole new meaning. "That awkwardness was the insight. Every aspect of my business mitigates that awkwardness from ordering

A graduate of the Srishti School of Art in Bengaluru, Madhav says Puncher Press came out of a series of conversations between him and his friends Appupen and Amitabh Kumar on how they could set up a network of comic artists publishing and distributin

Collections of 'gay' (and sometimes 'lesbian' or 'transsexual') news clippings and foreign magazines secretly stored away in an almirah at home; a clutch of books too, including Shakuntala Devi's The World of Homosexuals. Letters sent to newspaper ed

Fitkits The fitness industry's new concept, functional fitness, is pulling people away from the machines. At FitKits it means training with different setups indoors, outdoors and sometimes to the crashing sound of waves in the background. Beach worko

The young are natural rebels. Student movements across the world have toppled regimes, questioned government policies or at the very least, 'shaken it up'. In 1968, students of two Paris universities hit the streets, sparking a nationwide agitation t

An only child, Dilbagi would always get what he asked for. Except when he asked for a PlayStation. Denied, he asked his father for something else and far more expensive. "Growing up in India, it was difficult to get advanced robotic components or ba

A student of class 4, Saarang Sumesh started building complex machines, such as internal combustion engine models, from the age of three. He built the LEGO NxT robot models and mastered the art of making EV3 based models when he was five. Well verse

They are a generation apart, but Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh and Rajasthan Congress president Sachin Pilot are on the same page on ideas of development and inclusiveness. Sachin Pilot: How does it feel to become chief minister again after

In his crisp suit, he might look out of place in the fields, but no one's quite at home than this Mohali lad. In December 2015, Mehtab Singh Hans and his two associates Alekh Sanghera, 26, from Chandigarh, and Lokesh Kumar Singh, 37, from Lucknow po

One defined the rage and restlessness of the '70s and reinvented himself in the noughties. The other, a decade old in the film industry, is living up to an enormously rich heritage. Together, they are possibly the finest actors in the Mumbai film

It's no surprise that Albert Einstein is Arpit Narang's hero. The 13 year old student of Dikshant Public School in Zirakpur, Punjab, believes in the scientist's dictum "I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they c

It is often said that youth is wasted on the young. No longer, it seems. Although each generation thinks it is smarter than the one before, the millennials who grew up in the noughties are a different breed. It has been the best of times for them. Di

Katharsis happened to her, says Nithya Rao, in the winter of 2014. She had taken a solo trip to Hyderabad, paradise for the foodie. Telangana had been formed just a few months earlier and there was tension all around. The trip had a significant impac

Plunging head first from atop a mountain into choppy waters is how Anto Philip and Shreyans Jain described the launch of their start up, in an interview four years ago. At the time, both were first year students at Christ University, Bengaluru, wher

Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu may have won a minor political battle in getting the Andhra assembly to endorse his legislation granting the Kapu community a five per cent quota in education and government jobs, but will it stand up to judicia

It's the proverbial 'lull before the storm' deep in the forests of South Bastar as central paramilitary forces prepare for a major engagement with Maoist rebels. Five new camps, set up by the state police in South Sukma, South Bijapur, Dantewada a

On December 9, the Kerala government made a plea to continue the joint navy coast guard air force search for 129 fishermen, "missing" after Cyclone Ockhi struck on November 29, for another 10 days. But the mounting death toll (official count on De

An 11 km stretch along the main road between Marine Lines and Worli reserved exclusively for cyclists and walkers on Sunday mornings! Sounds fantastic? Happens to be true. Mumbai's first cycle track, which opened on the morning of December 3, is

There are several subtle facts and rousing conditions to the Jallikattu Movement of January 2017 with its epicentre at Marina beach acting both as a trigger and the manifestation of the anger of the people of Tamil Nadu. A fundamental truth is that t

Taking a cue from Union home minister Rajnath Singh, who on December 8 called for a 'J&K like border protection grid' in the five eastern frontier states to prevent a spillover of Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh into India, Jammu and Kashmir's depu

My journey in public life began early. I grew up in an environment that made me conscious of the issues afflicting the social, political and economic course of Assam. Students of Assam have always taken the lead whenever the state has faced a crisis

This summer I received a WhatsApp message from a friend about how 24 year old Mallika Arya from Gurugram had crowdfunded her trip to Antarctica to pursue her interest in climate change. My first reaction was, "Wow! Wish I had done that." It got me th

One hot summer day many years ago, I stepped out onto the balcony of our house in Delhi and saw a woman standing near a tree. In her hand she held a piece of paper. The woman's name was Satya Rani Chadda, whose daughter Kanchan had been killed by her

Ramesh Sippy is the celebrated filmmaker of Sholay, the wholesome entertainer which even 42 years after its release is still beloved by many, including India Today readers, who cited it as one of their all time favourites in the last Mood of the Nati

Hailing from two different generations in politics, Kamal Nath is a contemporary of Jyotiraditya's father, the late Madhavrao Scindia, and has been witness to the turbulent JP years, followed by the Emergency. Jyotiraditya, on the other hand, is s

Apart from being from political families, Minister of Railways Piyush Goyal and Poonam Mahajan, MP, have many habits in common dedication to work, fondness for social work, love for Mumbai and inclination towards family life. In a candid convers

Sourav Ganguly, one of the most successful Indian cricket captains and one day players, and Ravichandran Ashwin, an emerging powerhouse of cricketing talent, discuss what it takes to be on top of the game. Ashwin recalls how he began as a batsman

Both studied at the National School of Drama in New Delhi. Both have been the staple of independent Indian cinema. Both made forays into international cinema. The finest actors of their generation, Naseeruddin Shah and Irrfan Khan, on what inspire

Mahesh Bhupathi and Sania Mirza have more in common than being tennis champs. From hits and misses, winning highs and heartbreak losses, and everything that goes into making a tennis player an international star, Bhupathi and Mirza engage in a con

In the 1990s, Madhuri Dixit headlined films in which she eclipsed her male co stars with her charismatic presence and stellar dancing prowess. One of the first few female superstars, she was an inspiration for many and so the phrase, Main Madhuri

At first glance, there's not much in common between actors Aamir Khan and Ranveer Singh. If Aamir Khan wears the label of the quiet perfectionist with aplomb, then Ranveer Singh wears the magic cloak of a performer who is never short on energy. Du

"I don't like losing," Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh tells the young president of Congress in Rajasthan, Sachin Pilot. "I loved Dara Singh," Naseeruddin Shah, one of India's greatest actors, tells a surprised Irrfan Khan. Mahesh Bhupathi remi

BODY & PARTS It's all in your blood Serious air pollution can put people of the first three blood types (A, B, AB) at a higher risk of heart attack than the O type, shows research from the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute and Brigham Youn

ADD INCHES "Do short people lead short lives?" So read a 1975 ad, one of those that "guaranteed" additional inches to height or the bust line. Such ads have fallen by the wayside: either it's bad business or we've got smarter. ANACIN FOR YOU? One of

Gulzar on his new book, translations and Partition's wounds You translated your most recent novel, Two, into English yourself. Is translation really possible? You say you are still not at ease with it. It is not easy. It is not just about the meaning