Are insight and deception two sides of the same coin? Koli Mitra considers how the artifice of language shapes cognition and creativity. “In the beginning there was God who was the truth, and truth being invariable, it was singular and

The very words we use to define ourselves or anything in our world, and even the words we use to protest such definitions when we disagree with them, inevitably serve to distort our understanding of the real thing or meaning

Arunava Sinha considers how languages and their literary output are essentially lost, and yet something of them is rescued and given new life, when translated into a more widely read language. The word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for

  I Every night, in his bed, Altaf thinks about the mountain passes and the forests he has to pass through to return home. These musings are frightening but soothes him when he imagines himself in his home, in Srinagar.

From the heart of dark, deep forests to old Chinese restaurants, from colonised lands to uncommunicative deserts, food wrote Neruda and Neruda wrote food. Reads Pritha Kejriwal   Green is the colour that traps light from the sun to produce

Desiccated idli and sambhar in outer space… mashed potato and gravy sealed in foil pouches in-between shellfire on the battlefield… dehydrated sausage frittata on the ocean floor…. We take great pains to enhance our eating experience beyond just what we