Meenakshi J

Under the simmering heat of the morning sun, fishers in Kasimedu harbor in Chennai, the capital of India’s southeastern state of Tamil Nadu, busily sort their haul caught early that morning. They put aside the best fish to sell at the nearby market and toss anything rotten or unwanted onto the beach. Just up the lane, muscular butchers prepare the fish for market, chopping away inedible parts, periodically scraping clean their bloody butcher blocks into nearby plastic crates, which are dumped...

Clad in white and cross-legged on the floor, an artisan hunches over a cloth stretched over a large timber frame. Beside him, another works on a piece of nappa leather bound for the Italian factory of the French accessories designer Christian Louboutin. There, it will be tailored into a pair of shoes finished with Louboutin’s signature red-lacquered soles.
But these artisans don’t just produce for Christian Louboutin; their work can be found everywhere from the architect and decorator Robert ...

Known as choon paan, the vehicles deliver baked goods while playing everything from classical music to Tamil tunes
On my way back from an early morning stroll around Nuwara Eliya's tea gardens, the sound of Beethoven’s Fur Elise pervades the calmness of the countryside, as the warmth and golden hues of a rising Sun illuminate the lush mountain slopes.
The hill city is located in the Central Province of Sri Lanka, about 180 kilometres east of Colombo, and 80km from the sacred city of Kandy. Du...

The green fronds that grow along much of India's shoreline have large potential as a sustainable food source while helping to fight climate change.

Selvarani Mari is a fisher and seaweed collector who lives on Pamban Island of Tamil Nadu, on the southernmost tip of India.

Every day she helps her husband cast the fishing nets, maintains rafts for cultivating seaweed, and dives into the ocean to gather sargassum. But she always makes time to listen to the radio.

Mari, 33, and her friends and family all unfailingly tune into Kadal Osai on 90.4FM, India’s first local radio station for a fishing community. With guests including from older peo...

In this piece around microbiology and agar art, I talk about scientists who mix microorganisms with agar, a jelly-like substance from seaweed, to create amazing illustrations in petri dishes.

Clad in a white lab-coat, 26-year-old bespectacled microbiologist Balaram Khamari hunches over dozens of petri dishes, each filled with invisible colonies of bacteria. Two days before, Balaram filled a few of these petri dishes with agar—a jelly-like substance isolated from seaweed. A day after that, he streaked bacteria on the agar and slid the petri dishes into an in...

Named Dina Arobi by the Arabs, the island of Mauritius has changed hands from the Portuguese to the Dutch to the French and the British. Yet, it has an undeniable influence and entangled history with India and how!

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the public have turned to scientists and doctors for vital information. But science communication is a skill in itself, so we asked the experts to share their tips.
Science communication is more of an art than a science, one that compels physicians, scientists and science communicators to innovate new ways to reach the public. A good science communicator connects the public with the world around them.
“Science communication should be a means of connecting with [t...

ith his left leg lifted and held across his body at the hip, Punnainallur Nataraja balances gracefully. He stands exuberant — ringed by flames, locks of hair swaying toward the cosmos. He is Siva, the Hindu god of supreme divinity, incarnated as the Lord of Dance.
A vision in bronze, likely created in the 10th century, this particular sculpture also represents the artistic mastery of the Chola empire, one of the world’s longest-ruling dynasties, a reign that lasted for more than 1,000 years a...

C Sekar wants to reduce the impact of fashion on the environment even as he leads his community back to its glory days
Within the confines of a tin-roofed workshop in Anakaputhur, on the outskirts of Chennai in southern India, a frail-looking gentleman deftly scoops out strands of banana stem. C Sekar has consumption of a conscientious kind on his mind.
“We weave fabric out of these banana strands,” he tells The National.
Sekar, 58, is a third-generation weaver, and his team of about 100 wome...

While South Indians have eaten this go-to breakfast food for thousands of years, it has evolved into a fast food item to be eaten at just about any time, day and night.

It was time for Sunday breakfast, and I sprinkled a few water droplets onto a hot griddle to check if they would sizzle. Perfect. Quickly, I poured a ladleful of pale batter onto the pan’s centre, gently spiralling it outwards. Then, raising the heat, I added a generous spoonful of ghee (clarified butter) around the newly form...

Some of the fragile murals in the Ajanta caves in western India are thousands of years
old – and photographs of them have just been added to an archive deep in the Arctic

Even if you don't spot any of the rare felines, there's still plenty to do and see in this corner of Rajasthan

The jungle’s intoxicating scents, paired with piping hot adrak chai. Safaris, treks and historical ruins. And a heartbreaking farewell to a place that will remain etched in my memory. A recent trip to Sariska, in the lap of the Aravalli, the second oldest mountain range in the world, in India’s Rajasthan, offered all this and more...

In his backyard in Kerala, India, Vinod Sahadevan Nair, 60, grows bananas and plantains and rears chickens and ducks. Situated as it is in an agrarian region, abutting the biodiverse Western Ghats, his farm may seem typical. But a walk through his four acres reveals bananas growing in every conceivable shape, size, and hue: from deep red to turquoise blue. An avid farmer since the age of 12, Vinod has conscientiously collected some 430 varieties of banana over the past 30 years.

A few months back, on a trip to Moscow, I happened to visit a glossy mall to buy some essential oils. One of the base ingredients read uncannily familiar. I quickly dug through the annals of my memory, only to conclude that it’s native to us Indians, to be splurged on.
Vetiver. Ushira. Kuruveru. Vettiveyr
One component. Too many names.
So, what is vettiveyr ? It’s the Tamil moniker for a perennial grass with the botanical name Chrysopogon zizanioides, earlier known as Vetiveria zizanioides, b...