An eight-year-old girl stood frozen at the community well, her hands gripping an empty bucket. Just ahead, water glinted in the depths, close enough to touch. Her aunt’s grip on her shoulder was firm, “Wait. Let them fill their pots first.” On the other side, women from a dominant caste household t»»»

Early on in her latest collection, the Canadian poet Karen Solie apologises: “I’m sorry, I can’t make this beautiful.” The line appears in a poem, Red Spring, about agribusiness and its sinister human impact: the world’s most widely used herbicide, glyphosate, is “advertised as non-persistent; but »»»

Over the weekend, a tawny beast slithered under the garden fence and walked at a leisurely pace around our garden. It was an adult dog fox, the size of a giant corgi, with a magnificent bushy tail (unlike most of the mangy female foxes that populate our road). I opened the kitchen door to scare the»»»

Representative Image In an unsafe world, parents are keeping kids close, but curbs on their movement come at a cost, say expertsLike many Mumbaikars who grew up before the turn of the century, Dr Kruti Kachalia recalls walking to school and tuition on her own, sometimes taking an auto. Evenings wer»»»