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The celebration has been recognised as a National Festival by the Government of India and is being celebrated in Punjab since 1701In the summer of 1998, Maninder Singh Sodhi, a mechanical engineer and photographer from Punjab, decided to accompany his father, BS Sodhi, to witness Hola Mohalla. The three-day Sikh festival is celebrated annually at Takht Sri Keshgarh Sahib Gurudwara in Sri Anandpur Sahib, a holy city in Rupnagar district of Punjab. "My father, a President of India awardee for Exc

Dress to scare
Imagine Halloween without that fear-inducing costume. Impossible, right? From spooky outfits to seriously terrifying pirate eyewear, ghoulish masks, white ghost sheets and vampire garb, you can really find it all at the Party Hunterz store. This season, the store has moved beyond the packaged costumes with exclusive costume accessories that inspire personalised looks for each individual party-goer. And, from what we are told, there are over 30 costumes to choose from.
Where: Party

A still from Lockstitch Lives shows a young girl from a family of domestic workers in Katarpuri, Gurgaon, home to several such workers. Pic/Helmstudio
Plug in your earphones and step into Lockstitch Lives to the whir of a sewing machine and a voiceover by researcher Avantee Bansal that introduces the "tangled story" of migrant garment and domestic workers in Delhi NCR's."Most migrant workers end up in cities only to get caught in a repetitive lockstitch of exclusionary urbanisation, struggling

Hailing from family of learned priests in Kolkata, Kalamandalam Piyal Bhattacharya grew up with a passion for studying the scriptures. “It was in 1999, when I went to Kerala Kalamandalam to learn Kathakali and Koodiyattam, that I came across the tradition of Natyashastra. It piqued my interest,” says Bhattacharya.Natyashastra is arguably the world’s oldest and most comprehensive compendium on all the performing arts. Written in Sanskrit, the text consists of 6,000 karikas (vers

A victory celebration by Shiv Sena workers at Anand Nagar in Thane in February 2012. Pic/Sameer MarkandeIt's 7.45 on the evening of Sankashta Chaturthi, a day that calls for women in Maharashtra to keep an upvas, which is broken after seeing the moon. It makes sense then, that in the last one-and-a-half hours, Anita Mayekar and her colleagues haven't even had a sip of tea or coffee. Yet, as she trudges along Lady Jamshedji Road, in order to get home on time to make the mandated modaks, there's