Quarantine tales: How Bengalureans are coping with lockdown (The Hindu)

At 6:07 pm on Wednesday, keyboard tunes to Kishore Kumar’s song Yeh Shaam Mastaani… (This fun evening…) reverberated in the quad of a gated community in Bangalore. The occasion: Self-imposed quarantine due to spread of COVID-19. It started as a call for ideas to keep one entertained during the quarantine on the Whatsapp group comprising residents of the apartment complex. “Balcony antakshari”...

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Family Trees (The Caravan Magazine)

Shyam Sunder Paliwal was the sarpanch of Piplantri, a village in Rajasthan’s Rajsamand district, between 2005 and 2010. His father helped a marble company establish a unit in the village. In return, the company let his family sell its scrap marble, making them affluent. Over the years, excessive marble mining and sporadic droughts caused a severe depletion in the village’s groundwater levels....

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