Archita Raghu

CHENNAI: From fables at bedtime, and English lessons in school to novels, traditional children’s literature is penned with the overwhelming urge to instill mora

CHENNAI: Bricks, walls, and dust — M Mercy watched her home in Thideer Nagar being razed down to the ground in 2017. That night, she and her family were carted to Perumbakkam's government housing board buildings with few other residents. Till then, she didn't know what the words eviction and resettlement meant. “We didn't know areas beyond Thiruvanmiyur. At night it was like they blindfolded us, put us on a garbage truck and dropped us off in a forest. It was like dumping waste on a wasteland,” the member of the Information and Resource Centre for the Deprived Urban Communities explains.

CHENNAI: In Odisha’s Ganjam town, Pratima’s window used to overlook the glimmering ocean, rocks and pastel skies. Over the years, as the Rushikulya river mouth

CHENNAI: “There’s a thought that we can’t do anything. But we want to and can stand on our own feet, and earn,” says Soumya, a disabled Zomato delivery personne

CHENNAI: As the standard question of ‘what you want to be when you grow up’ made the rounds, most children I knew speedily scrawled one response: an astronaut.

CHENNAI: The smell of glue and ink, the scribbling of pens, the sharp thumping of a rubber stamp, and bleary figures waiting in line — post offices store hopes,

CHENNAI: At the pharmacy counter at VSR Hospital, Premavathy carefully examines hurried, nearly-illegible scribbles of prescriptions. Each capsule, medicine or

CHENNAI: Every monsoon, water carves a path, and rivulets return gushingly to their basins. While topography may have changed and areas are rendered unrecognisa

CHENNAI: A blank screen in a cinema theatre transforms every day, portraying tales of heart-wrenching star-crossed lovers, a goosebump-inducing haunted house, o

HYDERABAD: As the scorching sun hinted at the start of summer, the season of sweat, endless demands for elaneer (tender coconut), patches of prickly heat follow