Pulkit Vasudha Cruising on a dark, desert highway across the width of California, I entered the outskirts of Phoenix on a balmy summer night. Long before the city lights approached, the weak beams of my 1995 Nissan began picking out stupefied giants scattered across a bare Arizonian landscape. As I pulled up outside my host’s, [...]
Pulkit Vasudha I had planned to arrive in Ho Chi Minh City in fading daylight, so I could guiltlessly gawk at the horrific reminders of the Vietnam War. I had expected a city struggling with the lingering pain of war, its people maimed and crippled by Agent Orange, and the economy buckling under imposed communist rule. [...]
Pulkit Vasudha A rustic fishermen’s hamlet speckled with cashew shrubs, palm trees fringing the horizon, brown sands dotted with seagulls, and a blue sea yet undiscovered by weekend beach seekers. “Near Chennai? Impossible,” I said, when told about it. The adventure tour company assured me it wasn’t a marketing gimmick. It wasn’t. Katupalli Islands, 40 [...]
Pulkit Vasudha , TNN Wrapped in blankets, in Washington DC, almost two million people braved -13 degree celsius to be a part of a historic presidential inauguration. In homes across the nation, people woke up as early as 4 am to catch the action live on TV. At breakfast meetings, viewing parties, and coffee houses, people [...]
Pulkit Vasudha Ahmedabad, December 21 Sairaben Ahmed (name changed) glances furtively at the hosepipe snaking across the floor of the kitchen as she chops vegetables. In her ‘one room, kitchen, toilet’ tenement in Maqdum Nagar in Vatva, she is waiting for the evening supply of water. However, she is not the only person in Maqdum [...]
Pulkit Vasudha Ahmedabad, December 13 With barely two days left for the second and final phase of the Assembly elections, the fanfare of campaigning is at its peak in Maninagar. Both the Congress and BJP workers rallying strong and loud for their candidates—Union Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dinsha Patel and Chief [...]
Pulkit Vasudha Ahmedabad, December 9 One fine morning in November 2005, Pathan Shamshad was getting ready to go to work, when he suddenly heard bulldozers thundering through the narrow lanes outside his house. Without any notice, the workforce of the Ahmedabad Urban Development Board (AUDA) had descended in the Bakra Mandi area of Ranip to [...]
Pulkit Vasudha Ahmedabad, December 4: The Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A) is providing a platform to entrepreneurs to market and sell their traditional delicacies, which are made using organic ingredients. Dilip Patel is one such person who has been in the business of manufacturing pure jaggery, without using chemicals or acid, for the last [...]
Pulkit Vasudha Ahmedabad, November 30 The next time you enroll your child to a new school, please make sure the teacher knows his alphabets. According to data released by the state’s education department in reply to a Right to Information (RTI) application filed by academician Deepak Patel, over 60 per cent of Ahmedabad’s primary school [...]