Innehållsförteckning för May 14, 2018 från India Today

It is said the more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war. This is a lesson India refuses to learn—sadly, most of the sweat is not out of any exertion but frustration at the pace of modernisation and indigenisation of our armed forces. The world is moving towards third and fourth generation warfare. Third generation warfare uses speed, stealth and surprise and involves cyber warfare, airpower and networked armed forces delivering precision strikes. Fourth generation warfare is aimed against violent non-state actors like the ISIS. Yet, here we are, still struggling, confusing military modernisation with a shopping list of weapons—which we are the world’s largest importers of—waiting patiently for the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) to deliver the magic bullet. In China, meanwhile, President Xi Jinping…

Union transport minister Nitin Gadkari revels in cultivating the image of a minister who steamrolls any opposition to infrastructure roadblocks. This January, he wondered what the Indian Navy was doing in the city when they should be on the Pakistan border—apparently because the navy had objected to a plan to build a floating jetty in the city. On April 24, at a function in Mumbai, he held forth on how he had removed a roadblock to a project by threatening to throw a tardy bureaucrat out of his office. Through the door, one hopes.…

CAST ASIDE by the BJP five years ago after their names surfaced in India’s biggest mining scam, the Reddy brothers of Ballari are back in the thick of things in Karnataka. They seem to be calling the shots for the saffron party in the assembly polls, even fielding confidant B. Sriramulu against Chief Minister Siddaramaiah in the Badami seat in Bagalkot district after the party failed to find a challenger. It’s clearly been difficult for the BJP to part company with the powerful mining magnates who bankrolled the party’s first victory in Karnataka in 2008. Besides nominating brothers G. Karunakara Reddy and G. Somashekhara Reddy, the party has given the Reddy clan five more assembly tickets in their iron ore-rich bastions of Ballari and Chitradurga. The saffron leadership, however, insists…

Shivraj Singh Chouhan is on a spending spree. In an assembly election year, not a week has gone by without the chief minister announcing doles that add up to thousands of crores in state funds. Last week, targeting the unorganised labour sector, Chouhan announced Rs 4,000 for every pregnant woman in the category with a further Rs 12,500 to be given after childbirth. Compensation for the death of the head of the family, medical treatment, housing, education of wards up to doctorate level, coaching fees for children, loans to start their own business and flat electricity rates are some of the others sops worked out for the sector. Total registrations for the schemes could touch 20 million. Initial estimates by the finance department suggest Rs 5,000 crore will be needed.…

1 Ammunition For artillery, rocket launchers and tanks. Includes ammunition purchased on fast track after the 2016 surgical strikes 2 Helicopters The army needs 200 Russian Kamov Ka-226T helicopters the government selected in a G2G deal in 2015 to replace its ageing Chetak and Cheetah fleet; 60 choppers to be procured from Russia, it will make another 140 in India 3 Anti-tank missiles The army to acquire 1,600 Spike missile launchers and 8,356 launchers directly from Israel under a deal that was cancelled in January but resurrected as a G2G deal. It is reportedly in the final stages of negotiations 4 Quick reaction surface-to-air missiles Eight regiments of missiles to replace Soviet-manufactured Osa-AK, SA-6 missiles which protect advancing Strike Corps from air attack. Deal in final stages of clearance 5…

The joke doing the rounds in Congress circles is that party president Rahul Gandhi has been scouting for Doon School alumni to bring the party back to power in the states. What has prompted the joke is the appointment of 71-year-old party veteran Kamal Nath as president of the Madhya Pradesh Congress Committee on April 26. Nath is the second Doon School alumnus to be appointed as a state chief by Rahul in two years, the first being Capt. Amarinder Singh, who led a Congress landslide in the 2017 Punjab elections and became chief minister. If the Congress replicates its Punjab success in Madhya Pradesh later this year, Nath will be following in the footsteps of Singh, three batches senior to him in school. The nine-time Lok Sabha MP from…

For The Dream Box Project, artist Sudarshan Shetty constructed wooden replicas of four decommissioned film projectors, placing the duplicates alongside the obsolete originals. Characteristic of Shetty’s work, the steampunk originals and wooden replicas are invested with meaning: the originals salvaged from the defunct ‘Drive-in Cinema’ he frequented as a young man, and the copies carved out of wood from dismantled homes. The combined impact is like a drive-in obituary. “The act of replicating things is a contemporary position. There is no way to look forward without looking back,” Shetty says. The location is Maker Maxity’s new, gleaming, drive-in theatre (and the gravesite of the old one) at the Bandra Kurla Complex. “What is the need for making the drive-in cinema where [the old one] was?” he asks. “I don’t know…

Normally, white hair stands for age and perhaps wisdom, and reminds us of our mortality. But for residents of Orisha, a magical land created by novelist Tomi Adeyemi, borrowing bits and bobs from Nigeria, white hair is dangerous. It means you have magical blood, that you’re a “maggot” that King Saran decreed must be wiped from the land. But can man really keep magic in chains? Especially when magic has on its side the white-haired and free-spirited Zelie? Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone is the first part of an Afrofuturist fantasy. Inspired by Hunger Games and already heading towards a film adaptation, this is a book aimed at a young adult readership (which means adults can read it with zero guilt). It ticks some important boxes of political correctness—a…

When Bill Hader walks onto the screen at the beginning of Barry—now showing on Hotstar—you cannot help but laugh. Then he starts strangling, shooting and bludgeoning people. Comedians have long trafficked in metaphorical death—“I’m dying up here” for a show gone wrong, “I killed last night” for a hilarious success. In making his murders literal, Hader is clearly trying to escape the image we have of him from his sketches on America’s Saturday Night Live. But as his mid-western hitman character embraces the Hollywood struggling actor scene, you get the feeling Hader’s trying too hard—unwisely striving to be forgotten as the laugh-out-loud comedian and slowly trying to work this darker angle like Will Arnett (especially in Flaked) or Rainn Wilson in Backstrom. The SNL star has written, created and directed…

Q. If you got to interview one actor, who would it be? I’d love to interview Govinda, ask him why he hasn’t done many more films like Hatya. Nobody can touch him in comedy, but he is equally good with intense stuff. Q. What’s the best advice you have got? Don’t think about what people will say because they are thinking from a commercial or business point of view. We are actors, we deal with emotions, so put your heart into what you are doing. Aamir told me this. Q. 2017 was a standout year for you. Has the industry reaction changed? There is definitely more acceptance. They trust me now, they feel we can make a film with him and invest a certain amount of money. Q. After Shahid…

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Imagine my plight. I grew up in Chennai and suddenly my daughter tells me that she wants to go to Iceland. Now those of you sitting in Delhi and beyond might think that this is no big deal. What’s a bit of snow, ice and freezing temperatures, you might say. Well, for this Chennai girl, going to Iceland is like going to Mars. And now that I have gone to Iceland, I can tell you that it was a journey like none other. There is a difference between travel and journey. The former alludes to a checklist of places that you visit and tick off. It refers to sights and sounds; all exterior journeys are inward. It is an alchemy of place and person all of which catalyse change. Iceland…

Mumbai was supposed to be a pit stop. Although I’d travelled throughout India, I thought I had all the good cities figured out, and didn’t need another one to complicate things. What I knew of Mumbai was that it was big, had prohibitively expensive real estate, and a lot of movie stars. In 2009, I was on a book research trip and needed to change planes in Mumbai to get from Kochi to Kolkata. I would have spent a few hours in the airport, if not for two reasons. The first was my nine-year-old daughter, who’d come with me. Pia loved Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and dreamed of Rahul and Anjali dancing through the streets. The second reason was the lure of the older generation. My mother, Karin, and my…

The journey that changed my life was a chance visit to Srinagar, Kashmir. It was not my first time into Srinagar but it was the first journey that inspired a new avatar. My parents had always loved Kashmir and almost every year we would take our family’s summer holidays there. We would stay at what was then called the Oberoi Palace (now the Lalit Grand Palace). Our trips always consisted of having meals on the generous lawns of the palace, endless shikhara excursions on the Dal Lake, walking through the numerous apple and cherry orchards, taking pony rides at the Polo Ground, sipping sweet water of the Chashme Shahi springs, partaking of the exquisite honey-walnut fudge at Moonlight Bakery and breaking away for a few nights to the snowy peaks…

You go one flight down from ground level to get to Perbacco, the shiny, new Italian restaurant at The Lodhi, New Delhi. Despite being underground, there’s a well of light that spills into the restaurant in the day, being replaced by stardust at night. One wall is entirely glass; another recreates the vibrancy of Tuscany with its colour-happy whimsy. There was a time when The Lodhi had fallen off the grid, but over the last year it has got a complete makeover thanks to its sprightly General Manager, Vikramaditya Singh, who has transformed it into a hot and desirable dining spot with international collaborations and pop ups becoming the norm. With the launch of Perbacco, Singh and Michelin star chef Adriano Baldassarre have come together to create a niche space…

Rama has been dragged into yet another controversy. This time by American scholar Audrey Truschke, who in a tweet claimed that in the Ramayana of Valmiki, Sita describes Rama as a “misogynist pig”. This refers to Sita’s first meeting with Rama after her rescue from Ravana’s captivity; the context for her anguish is set by the unimaginably harsh words spoken by Rama. Sita is dismayed and contrasts such ‘prakrita’ conduct and speech to what is expected of a ‘veer’ (noble hero) that her husband is (Valmiki Ramayana, VI, 116.5). Truschke, in an inflammatory tweet, chose to translate ‘prakrita’ as ‘misogynist pig’; reactions on Twitter were expectedly sharp. There were threats and abuses too, which, it must be said, are unconscionable and totally out of line. But Truschke found the attacks…

Officially, every village in India now has access to electricity, the last being Leisang village in Manipur, connected to the grid on April 28. As various media outlets have pointed out, electrification according to the definition of various central governments requires only a fraction of the households in a given village to be connected to the grid. A recent press release by the power ministry promised that “universal household electrification” will be achieved by the end of 2018. 18,374 Villages electrified since 2014. In April 2015, according to government numbers, 19,679 villages still had no electricity 649,481 Villages in India (2011 census), of which 593,615 are inhabited; critics say this government has effectively electrified 3% of villages 82% Rural households electrified, says government, arguing that the old definition of electrification…

Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath has had it with criticism over his frequent visits to his home district Gorakhpur. The BJP’s defeat in the March bypolls, a seat Yogi won in five successive elections, has added to his pique. Now, he has decided to act and instructed that a CM’s camp office be set up in Gorakhpur by the end of May. The office, similar to the one PM Narendra Modi has set up in Varanasi, will be supervised by an officer of the rank of SDM and reporting directly to the CM’s office in Lucknow. Sandeep Unnithan with Anshuman Tiwari, Amitabh Srivastava, Kiran D. Tare, Asit Jolly and Ashish Misra…

A day after he was inducted as a minister in Captain Amarinder Singh’s cabinet, Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa, who was yet to be handed the jails portfolio, received a congratulatory call from an inmate. The new mantri won’t name the man or the jail the call came from, but he conducted a surprise raid at the Central Jail at Patiala on April 25 looking for illegal mobile phones. There’s a profusion, it turns out. Some 1,547 mobile phones were confiscated from inmates in Punjab’s jails in 2017. But there are evidently some that slipped by, including the one that jails minister Randhawa’s ‘friend’ used to felicitate him.…

Union minister Nitin Gadkari’s grand proposal to build a state-of-the-art infrastructure and recreational hub on 34 hectares of land on Mumbai’s east coast has set off a vehement agitation. The imminent redevelopment on the Mumbai Port Trust (MbPT)—owned real estate, extending from Colaba to Wadala and beyond, is set to evict some 200,000 people including residential tenants and steel traders. They have now revived the long-dormant Mumbai Port Trust Tenants’ Association to oppose the government. The MbPT had issued successive notices to the residents and businesses at Darukhana, asking them to pay rents as revised by the Supreme Court in 2012. It was significantly higher than the Rs 5 per square metre per year on which the land was first leased out to some 2,200 lessees in 1942. Over the…

SOMETIME THIS YEAR, the Union minister for defence Nirmala Sitharaman is to issue a fresh set of operational directives to the armed forces. The slim, top secret document called the ‘Raksha Mantri’s Operational Directives’, usually updated once in a decade, asks the armed forces to prepare for the possibility of a simultaneous war with both Pakistan and China. What the document doesn’t mention, however, is the army’s glaring inability to fight and win simultaneous wars with Pakistan and China. “We presently have barely enough to hold both fronts,” a senior army official says. The gap between military strategy and capability emerged at army vice chief Lt Gen. Sarath Chand’s recent deposition before the parliamentary standing committee (PSC) on defence. In the report, which was tabled before Parliament on March 13,…

Q. What is your strategy against the BJP in Madhya Pradesh? A. In our political history, we have never seen a situation where every section of the society—farmers, traders, youth, labourers, Dalits and women—is in distress. Seventy-five per cent of the state’s population directly or indirectly depends on agriculture. If agriculture is in distress, the economy is in a mess. We have to convince the people that the Congress can provide an alternative to this distress and that their future is secure only in the hands of the Congress. Our party has much more talent than the BJP. People have realised how the BJP government fooled them, which they will never accept. Q. What if the Congress wins and Jyotiraditya Scindia is made the chief minister? A. I’m not hungry…

Intizar Husain’s popularity with English-speaking readers has spiked since his death in 2016. It began with the biography, A Requiem for Pakistan, that year and was followed by translations of his book on Delhi and now two novellas—Day and Dastan (Din aur Dastan). Distinct in form and content, the two works juxtapose novelistic realism and the fantastic narrative style of the Dastan. Steeped with the nostalgia for which Husain is famous, Day is the story of a feudal family watching their wealth slip away. The haveli that anchors them to their ancestry is mired in a court case that absorbs Zamir’s life. The familiar props that make up the paraphernalia of the mid-twentieth century zamindari household are rusting away. A slow but certain decay suffuses the story and the people…

The valour displayed by Indian soldiers on battlefields around the world is legend. Indians have fought with honour and glory in the two world wars and in numerous wars and conflicts since Independence. They have served in France and Flanders, Gallipoli and Mesopotamia in the First World War, and in Dunkirk, North Africa, and Myanmar in the second. In WW-II, the strength of the Indian army rose to 2.5 million men. It was the largest volunteer army in the history of human conflict. Until now the stories of these campaigns and the brave men who fought in them have been the exclusive domain of the military professional or the historian. However, all that is set to change. Spearheading a campaign to bring military history out of its cloistered preserves and…

IT’S SOMETIMES HARD TO REMEMBER WHEN travel went from being something that got one from point A to point B to something that was accorded so much importance and involved months of precise planning. When life was simpler and less nuanced, passport stamps were not an acquisition and people undertook journeys to connect with friends and family rather than to detach from them and rediscover themselves as they already knew who they were. Over the years, immersive travel that invokes a deliberate detachment from the routine has garnered favour, especially since people are constantly looking for ways to minimise their brush with the mundane. Today people want journeys to help them shed reality and slip into a second skin, one which is not dictated by the roles they play in…

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AS HE WALKS IN TO THE PRESIDEN- tial suite at the ITC Kakatiya, Hyderabad, Rana Daggubati is set for work from the word go, untouched like a yogi by the minor stir of star struck folks in his wake. Tall, dark and sporting a wildish beard, the Baahubali star carries himself with casual ease. The best thing about his physical appearance, he says, is his height (6 ft 4 inches), “You do not have to really vie to get attention.” Soon after, though, Daggubati delivers a surprise. “I only work on my physique to suit the character I am playing, else I do not step into the gym,” he says, shattering the popular impression that he might be something of a fitness freak. He is 25-30 kilos lighter since Baahubali.…

Many people leave home to go to university but it was not so simple for me. I felt I’d lived between two cities my whole life. I was born in London and as a child we’d spend school holidays there, a respite from the Karachi heat. Mostly these consisted of my mother taking me to museums and amusement parks but also of beautifully bored long stretches where I’d bring a stack of books from the library and read two a day. It seemed to always be raining. I liked the noise it made against the windows. I liked splashing obnoxiously through the puddles on the pavement. The little circle of the world in my parent’s house, the streets near it that began to grow familiar. This seemed enough at the…

Antarctica is such a hopeful, alluring, and mysterious place. However clichéd it may sound, there exists an inexplicable energy here unlike any other part in the world. It’s hard to process emotions and describe raw beauty in a place so pristine, pure and primal. The landscape is Daliesque, it melted my brain, much like Salvador’s melting watches. I didn’t come across any life altering epiphany but “perspective” earned an entirely new meaning. THE DRAKE PASSAGE As if the name isn’t terrifyingly ominous-sounding enough, the adventure to the Antarctic begins long before you even see an iceberg. Once you leave the Beagle Channel, where the waters of the South Atlantic and Pacific Oceans meet, you will start your excellent adventure onward to the infamous, untrustworthy, not-to-be-messed-with Drake Passage. A treacherous channel,…

It’s hard to know what are my true memories and what I remember from the fevered dreams that followed. Pakistan is a place that gets under your skin. I left London on a frozen February night and returned five days later to grey skies, thick with snow. And in between there was heat and haze. I was dazed by the difference in the light, the vastness of the sky. I have lived in a big built up city for a long time and when I look up, even on a clear day the sky seems smaller, the view is crowded with buildings, cranes, aeroplanes. I had forgotten how big the sky is. Looking up into the immense dark sky, I felt like a speck, a tiny floating being in a…

All That Glitters... In a tweet that was both sycophantic and self-congratulatory, coal and railways minister Piyush Goyal celebrated the ‘electrification’ of every village in India by way of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ diptych that purported to show the effect of the government’s impressive efforts. “With the elimination of darkness from the lives of fellow Indian villagers”, Goyal concluded sententiously, “we commit ourselves to building a new and #PowerfulIndia”. The NASA images he used, taken from space, showed the extent of India’s brightening in 2016, compared with four years earlier. In the wake of an outpouring of Twitter cynicism, Goyal’s office linked to both NASA and an article in National Geographic to bolster his case. But at least half of the credit for rural electrification between 2012 and 2016 must…

The Tej Pratap Yadav-Sushil Modi spat threatened to spill into a wedding pandal last year. Furious over Modi’s exposés of the Lalu Prasad Yadav family’s allegedly shady deals, Tej Pratap publicly threatened to disrupt the deputy CM’s son Utkarsh’s wedding last December. He didn’t carry out his threat, though. Patna held its breath as Tej Pratap recently distributed cards for his May 12 wedding. Will he call on Deputy CM Modi with a wedding card? Their smiles seemed to suggest the hatchet has been buried.…

We need to stop focusing on our hatred for the perpetrator and instead think a lot more about protecting our children The rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua sparked national outrage in India. With a society in shock about the violence its children face and the growing demands for a swift and definite response, the government responded with an ordinance that, among other things, introduced the death penalty for child rape. But as the age-old cliché warns us, hard cases make bad law. In introducing the death penalty for child rape, the assumption is it will deter potential offenders. The problem with the deterrence argument is that nobody knows for sure. Death penalty deterrence studies are extremely complicated and India does not have any such study. In…

Finally getting a chance to send a candidate to the Rajya Sabha from Bihar after 16 long years, the Congress settled on Akhilesh Singh, an upper caste Bhumihar leader. A month on, in April, the party has now nominated Prem Chandra Mishra, a Brahmin, to the state legislative council. Is this upper caste preference part of a larger electoral gameplan? A senior party leader admits the move is “curious”. “Both Singh and Mishra won only because they were backed by the RJD, on advice from Lalu Prasad Yadav,” he says. But the choices weren’t incidental. With Lalu ‘guaranteeing’ the Muslim, Yadav and a large chunk of OBC votes, the Congress is back to wooing the Bihari upper castes, who now constitute an electorally significant votebank. Unlike in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh,…

Manjima Bhattacharjya’s new book Mannequin: Working Women in India’s Glamour Industry has been a long time in the making. When it began life as a PhD thesis in the mid-2000s, Bhattacharjya didn’t know she would be focusing on the modelling industry. “The group hadn’t even registered on my radar as a possible area of serious study,” she explains in an e-mail interview. “I wanted to look at new areas of work that women were being drawn into in post-globalisation India. At the time, for example, there were hordes of women across South Asia being employed in export processing zones and garment factories. Tribal girls were migrating en masse to metros to work as live-in domestic help in newly nuclear families,” she says. It turned out there were also a remarkably…

 Selected for the Cannes Critics’ Week, debutant director Rohena Gera’s Sir is a romantic drama set in Mumbai, portraying the blossoming love between Ashwin (VivekGomberof Court fame)and Ratna (Tillotama Shome), a widow who happens to be his domestic help. “Cannes isn’t a pleasant surprise, it’s a dream you don’t dare to dream that’s suddenly reality,” says Gera The last time a first-time Indian director went to the Cannes Critics’ Week, Ritesh Batra came back with the viewer’s choice award for The Lunchbox (2013). Will Gera be equally successful? In Sir, she seeks to challenge the class dynamics of the relationship between the householder and the help, who live with the family but are never part of it. “Your cleaning lady shouldn’t sit on your sofa. Your child’s nanny shouldn’t eat…

The fluid nature of jewellery is such that it can take the shape and form of anything that catches the fancy. Celebrating the craft of transforming gems into intriguing shapes, Christie’s Geneva Magnificient Jewels sale features over 400 exceptional pieces, each a work of art. The sale which will take place in Geneva on May 16 after making an appearance at Christie’s flagship galleries at Hong Kong, London and New York, will feature diamonds, high quality coloured stones, Art Deco, retro and animal-themed jewellery. The highlights of the sale are Cartier’s sapphire, diamond, emerald and onyx Panthere ring (seen here) part of a private collection, estimated at 68 lakh, featuring an intense yellow cushion mixed-cut 4.61-carat diamond, yellow diamonds, circular-cut emeralds and a mother-of-pearl beak. The other big ticket lots…

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As we travel, we unravel and give ourselves time to rethink who are we are and who we want to become. Unlike travel, journeys are often more contemplative and focus on a process rather than a clinical getting from one place to another. In this issue, a range of eminent writers, a photographer and an adventure traveller share their most epic journeys. Some like writer Ashwin Sanghi who have been to Kashmir countless times found an old tomb there that inspired his first book, The Rozabal Line. Others like Sarvat Hasin, born in Karachi but educated in London found her identity was shaped by both cities. Author Shoba Narayan’s maiden visit to Iceland became a lesson in surviving Artic temperatures and adventure enthusiast Himraj Soin recounts the wonder of Antartica.…

Being married to a very active Englishman (Matthew Spacie, founder of Magic Bus and a co-founder of Cleartrip.com) means that our holidays have always been… well, active. Matthew’s father is an ex-paratrooper, so even visits to my in-laws involve at least three outdoor activities daily, including cycling, hill walking and an activity of my choice which usually involves sitting on the grass and eating food, much to the horror of my in-laws. It is not a complaint, but I thought it might become a consideration for us once we had three children in three years. I was wrong. Last summer we took our not yet one-year-old, our two-year-old and our three-year-old to visit their grandparents in Leigh-on-Sea, in the South East of England for a month. It was the first…

II grew up in Nainital, with some years in Shimla as well. The mountains were all around us, but when was it that I first encountered and understood the snow clad majesty of the Himalayas? Somehow, I can’t seem to place it in the context of my own age, the month or the year or the season. Yet, I can never forget that liminal moment when I first glimpsed those distant ranges, spread out before me beyond a vista of intermediary hills and valleys, draped in blue haze. The towering presences in the horizon were luminous with grace, I saw them not a geographical feature but as people, as characters, as individuals. I played with their names in my mind. Nanda Devi—it was she who attracted me most, this tall…

From the 19th century when art was supported primarily by the maharajas, in the 20th century art became secular and started to be collected by Parsi professionals and wealthy Gujarati businessmen in Mumbai, helped in large measure by Mahatma Gandhi’s push for young Bengal artists to help his friend Rabindranath Tagore raise funds for Viswabharati University. The art market began in real earnest in the early 90s, which is when Rakhi Sarkar, 70, started her Kolkata gallery, Centre for International Modern Art (CIMA) in 1993, fusing her love for art and her passion for collecting. CIMA’s inception was through an exhibition she curated in 1986 called Visions, where she showcased over 200 works. “It was virtually four retrospectives in one. Jogen Chowdhury, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Somnath Hore and Ganesh Pyne. The…

Top tips on what to keep in mind while buying perfume Intensity, density and originality. Olfaction is the sense of intimacy, and we have to understand the emotions we feel when we smell a perfume we like. How should one wear perfume to ensure one smells good for longer? Good personal hygiene is key. Spray perfume on the pulse points of the body and not perspiration ones like your wrists, inner corners of the elbows, underneath the collar bones and behind the knees. What are some of the ingredients and fragrances that are popular this year? I prefer talking about the research of and quality in raw materials rather than star ingredients. This approach drove me to use the famous rose Centifolia of south of France which is pure jewellery…

BREEZY DRAPES Summer fashion comes with its own set of decisions. You want to be comfortable enough if you are moving through the day but at the same time not freeze in the office. Check out these labels for a fuss-free wardrobe. Artful Styles RIMI NAYAK Designer Rimi Nayak has quite literally taken to the paintbrush for her new collection Colour Me Your Kind. The colours in a rainbow are represented with texturing and fabric manipulation to mirror the effect of painting techniques such as marbling and colourplay. Vivid azure blues, muted reds and chrome yellows make a colour story that is bright and yet pleasant enough for the summer. The silhouette is relaxed, with Nayak’s trademark draped and pleated dresses. The juxtaposition of the clothes in a gallery space…