Group tours, a personal perspective

The idea of a group tour often brings to mind a swarm of matching hats following a flag-waving guide. But if you look closer at that crowd, you’ll see a fascinating mix of personalities forced into a small ecosystem. A group tour is essentially a social experiment on wheels. When you cram thirty strangers into…

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The day Google stopped being the front door

Until a few years ago, the internet worked like a city of shopfronts. You could ideally build a website, maybe polish your search rankings, run campaigns, write engaging blogs, and then wait for people to walk in. In essence the discovery was messy, but it was visible. A user searched, scanned ten links on the…

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The target is not the transition

There is a particular kind of institutional dishonesty that does not involve lying. It involves announcing the right destination, then doing nothing meaningful to get there, and treating the announcement as the work itself. The first SteelWatch Corporate Scorecard, released this week, has put numbers to that behaviour across 18 of the world’s major steelmakers….

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Winner will be familiar but game may change

The key question in the 2026 Kerala assembly election is whether the state will return to its predictable cycle of power alternation, or whether voters will make history by electing the incumbent for a third consecutive time. For decades, Kerala’s politics has largely been a contest between two coalitions — the CPM-led Left Democratic Front…

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Why guava is so pyara

Being a city boy whose imagination was mostly fed by adventure stories, I was fascinated by the idea of climbing a tree to pick fruit. So, when I discovered that the house we were visiting had a line of guava trees in the garden laden with fruit, I really had no choice. Guava trees tend…

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Lessons for India from a war nobody wanted

One month into the US-Israeli assault on Iran, the conflict has produced outcomes few anticipated or desired. Indirect peace talks between Washington and Tehran — facilitated through Oman and Qatar — were still active when the strikes began on February 28. Goalposts shifted weekly: from degrading Iran’s nuclear programme to neutralising proxy networks or enforcing…

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When the soul begins to sing

“O chevalier, wine is that wine, poured by the hand of the Unseen into the cup of the heart and drunk by the eye of the spirit. The people became drunk with the passing of the cup, but I became drunk with the one who passed it,” said the prominent 12th-century Persian scholar and Sufi…

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How organisations should embed IQ, EQ, and SQ

I have worked with enough leaders and teams to know this uncomfortable truth: many organisations are intellectually sharp, emotionally clumsy, and spiritually empty. They can produce reports, forecasts, dashboards, and presentations with astonishing speed. They can analyse markets and outmanoeuvre competitors. Yet the same organisations often struggle with trust, burnout, blame, politics, defensiveness, and an…

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Mandatory summer staples

There are some foods that summer simply cannot do without. They are not just seasonal indulgences but quiet essentials—woven into the rhythm of long, sun-drenched days. From the first bite, they do more than cool the body; they awaken something deeper, a memory, a feeling, a fleeting return to simpler times.These foods become non-negotiable not…

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To cook or not to cook

A couple of years ago I came across a recipe book titled `To Cook, or Not to Cook, That Is the Decision’. But what to do if the decision endorses cooking but the most critical ingredient for cooking is missing. Yes, we are talking about the current crisis of LPG or cooking gas, a consequence…

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