There is something uncomfortable about looking at the modern world and noticing how many ordinary pleasures, habits, objects and institutions have complicated imperial histories. A khaki jacket can now be a fashion statement. A gin and tonic can be an expensive bar order. Afternoon tea can be a luxury hotel experience. A botanical garden can be a peaceful Sunday destination. A mosquito net can mean a good night's sleep. A tiffin box can carry someone's homemade lunch to work.

None of these things, however, arrived in the world in the simple form in which we know them today.

Colonialism was built around power, trade, military expansion, extraction and administration. It also created networks through which clothing, plants, medicines, architectural ideas, food habits, educational models and social institutions travelled between continents. Some were imposed. Some were borrowed. Some were already present and were simply given new meanings. Others escaped their original purpose completely and became part of everyday life.

That is what makes the history so strange.

This is not an argument that colonialism was beneficial because some of its leftovers are useful. It is an attempt to examine a more uncomfortable question: how do things born inside unequal systems survive long after the system itself disappears, sometimes because later generations find them genuinely practical, attractive or enjoyable?

1. Khaki Clothing, Safari Jackets and the Fashionable Art of Looking Ready for an Expedition

Khaki is one of the clearest examples of a military necessity becoming a fashion language.

The word itself comes from the Urdu word associated with dust or earth. During the nineteenth century, British troops in India began using dusty brown shades instead of highly visible white uniforms, helping them blend into the landscape. What began as practical military clothing eventually moved far beyond the battlefield.

Khaki became associated with military uniforms, outdoor clothing, colonial administration and exploration. The same colour then travelled into civilian wardrobes.

The safari jacket took the process further. Its multiple pockets, loose construction, belt and practical appearance were connected to tropical and field clothing rather than the needs of a modern city. Yet fashion eventually removed the garment from its original environment and turned it into a symbol of sophisticated travel.

Today, a woman wearing a fitted khaki safari jacket in a city has very little in common with the military officers and colonial officials who once wore comparable clothing in tropical territories. The jacket has been stripped of much of its original authority and turned into an aesthetic.

That is a recurring pattern in this story.

Colonial clothing becomes outdoor clothing. Outdoor clothing becomes fashion. Fashion then sells the appearance of practicality to people who may never actually need the practical feature that made the garment useful in the first place.

The safari jacket is perhaps the perfect example. Its pockets were useful because people carried things. Today, some versions have enough decorative pockets to suggest that the wearer is about to disappear into the African wilderness, even when she is actually walking into a café.

The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (Kaguya-hime)

A simple retelling of Japan's oldest surviving story

Chapter 1: A Glowing Bamboo in the Forest

How an old bamboo cutter found a tiny girl inside a shining stalk

Long ago, in a small village in Japan, there lived an old man who cut bamboo for a living. Everyone called him the bamboo cutter. He and his wife were kind people, but they were sad because they had no children.

One morning, the old man went to the bamboo forest as he did every day. This time, one stalk of bamboo was glowing with a soft golden light. He was surprised. He looked closer and cut it open carefully.

Inside the stalk sat a tiny girl, no bigger than his thumb. She was the most beautiful baby he had ever seen. The old man smiled. "You must be meant for us," he said gently. He placed her in his hands and carried her home to his wife.

A book title that just might help...

Say "North West Frontier Province" to most Indians and the mental image that shows up is borrowed almost entirely from old war films and news footage — rugged hills, tribal rifles, a permanently restless border. What gets left out of that image is a far stranger, far more layered history: a province that was Congress-run in a Muslim-majority stronghold, home to the only fully nonviolent Muslim mass movement in recorded history, the site of a massacre that rivals Jallianwala Bagh in brutality but rarely gets taught alongside it, and for a good stretch of the 19th century, the actual western edge of a Sikh empire. Here are four things about this region that even well-read Indians tend to get wrong, or simply never learn at all.

Congress Ran a Muslim-Majority Province Right Up To Partition

Despite NWFP being the only Muslim-majority province in British India, it was governed not by the Muslim League but by a Congress-aligned ministry under Dr. Khan Sahib, brother of freedom fighter Bacha Khan. This upends the popular assumption that Muslim-majority regions automatically meant League strongholds in the run-up to 1947. NWFP's political loyalties were shaped less by religion and more by the Pashtun nationalist, anti-colonial politics of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement — making its eventual accession to Pakistan, decided by a contested 1947 referendum that Congress and Bacha Khan boycotted, far less of a foregone conclusion than most textbooks suggest.

The problem with a French fry that is trying too hard to be healthy!!

Anyone who has made chai on a gas stove knows that the flame decides everything. Keep it low and patient, and the leaves open up, the ginger softens, the milk turns the colour of a good afternoon. Push it to high because you are in a hurry, and the milk climbs the sides of the pot and spills over before you can reach for the ladle. Nobody blames the tea. People ask who turned up the flame.

That, in the end, is the question the Madras High Court has just asked about a marriage. Its answer has been read by many as a blanket rule against wives who want a separate home. It is not that simple, and the difference matters to every couple who has ever argued about where to live.

Madras High Court Verdict: Pressure to Live Separately as Cruelty

The Madras High Court recently held that a wife who forces an only son to leave the joint family and set up a separate residence, and who goes to her maternal home frequently without reason, commits cruelty against her husband. A bench of Justice PT Asha and Justice N Mala refused to disturb a Family Court order that had granted the husband a divorce on the ground of cruelty.

The case is reported as S v. S, Civil Miscellaneous Appeal No. 2942 of 2026 (2026 LiveLaw (Mad) 438). The wife appealed under Section 19 of the Family Courts Act, 1984, against a decree dated 8 July 2026 passed by the Family Court at Cuddalore. The High Court dismissed her appeal.

Why the Court Called It Cruelty

A lot of effort has been made to infuse some dark humor into They Will Kill You. Honestly, it works in patches. You will love Asia Reaves as Beetz - a woman who can do only wrong, including being in the wrong places, being penalized by the law, and learning a whole lot of violence wizardry during her time in prison. The movie takes no time to set up a storyline.

Lee Cronin's The Mummy (2026) premiered on JioHotstar in India on September 17, 2026. One look at the movie poster on the Jio app might make you believe that this is connected to the Mummy franchise that built and then destroyed Brendon Fraser. You are wrong! Lee Cronin's The Mummy is an entirely different movie. The content is not even remotely connected to the globally popular franchise. Lee Cronin's The Mummy is more like folklore without the special effects associated with the original. It is classified as a horror movie on Jio Hotstar, but you might not feel the scares. The movie is set in Egypt, where an American family is temporarily residing. It is their little daughter who falls into the darkness of a lady who is perhaps the vessel for an evil force. The little girl is kidnapped and returned to her family nearly a decade later. What happened during this time? Why does a teenage girl look like the possessed child from The Exorcist?

Body Horror is perhaps the right niche and definition for Lee Cronin's The Mummy. You will find plenty of it spread across the movie. Expect skin, nails, meaty flesh, hair, bodily fluids, and blood to take center stage every time a sequence builds up. The movie does not explain much. It does not dig into the origins of the prehistoric evil that is known to rip apart families - it is just there - sometimes in a mummified tomb and then as something that can be transferred from one vessel to the next medium. The good thing about Lee Cronin's The Mummy is that it does not relent.

Walk into any neighbourhood shop in Dwarka early enough in the morning, and you'll catch the owner doing something that has nothing to do with commerce and everything to do with faith — lighting an agarbatti in front of a small framed photo tucked behind the counter, well before the first shutter fully lifts. It looks like a private ritual, and it is, but it's also strikingly ordinary once you realise almost every shopkeeper on earth is running some version of the same quiet ceremony. Strip away the specific gods, coins, and salt, and what you're left with is a global, remarkably consistent human habit: treating the first transaction of the day like it decides everything that follows. In India and Pakistan, this habit even has a name — bohni, the belief that the day's first sale sets the tone, in terms of luck, for every sale after it. Shopkeepers try to ensure the bohni transaction happens in cash, ideally at full price with no haggling, and customers are expected to be generous rather than difficult during it, since walking away from a genuine bohni buyer without a sale is considered inauspicious. In some regions, the first cash received gets spat upon lightly to ward off the evil eye, or touched reverently to each eye as a gesture of thanks. It's not unusual for a shopkeeper to chase a small loss on the first sale just to avoid an empty-handed opening.

The image on display here is from Healthline - it talks about Stress Rash. 

Have you experienced days when, out of the blue, without any history of things, and with no medically substantiated diagnosis, your skin develops maroon, reddish patches all across your face? It is hard to explain exactly what happens here, but I have suffered from this problem since 2005. I finally nailed it down to extreme anxiety that causes these flare-ups, but read around- AI or Google search- you will not find a lot of convincing answers regarding the diagnosis. I think anxiety-induced skin eruptions are a real thing. Perhaps, by now, there should be a well-defined name for this condition, if not a disease. I recall getting these patches and then running to a neighborhood chemist to give me something to compress it and cool it down. Needless to say, nothing really worked. You have to just talk to yourself and stop hyperventilating, but the problem is that you are trying to calm yourself down when your body is already reacting to something you have been carrying in your mind. I even had a teammate about 12 years back who had the same symptomatology. In her case, the entire face would develop red spots, like pox or chronic acne, and by evening, when her nerves settled, they would vanish! Literally, vanish without a trace.

There is absolute truth in believing that the kettlebell is the true king of all body conditioning equipment!

This is for anyone who truly believes that kettlebell movement engages the whole body and that there is no other exercise that comes close - you were absolutely right! I am now about 8 months into kettlebell movements. I can say this with utter confidence - there is nothing out there in the form of fancy gym equipment that challenges, engages, and conditions the body like a weighted kettlebell. I use the word "kettlebell" because of another truth that my journey with the KB has uncovered - working out with light kettlebells is to just get used to the range of movement that swinging the kettlebell induces, but if you want to see real results, you have to get slightly uncomfortable. You have to choose kettlebells that are a bit beyond the realm of easily swinging them upwards or towards the side. A slightly heavier kettlebell really works out the entire body. Even those movements that are not intended to target the core do it anyway. This is why I truly believe that the love for kettlebell and its growing global credentials are not a passing phase - this is not an Instagram trend - this is here to stay.