Saturday​ Feeling: Who's making films for children in India?

In a few weeks, we’ll be in the midst of school summer holidays, and for parents, it’s the time to be at their creative best, finding ways and means of entertaining the offspring. As complicated as childhood can be, the memories of those summer months of doing nothing are still pristine. It seems such indolence now—hours spent hiding under the bed and reading. Occasionally, there’d be a Disney film to watch on a video cassette player. Much has changed in the world of entertainment, but it turns out that the big budget Pixar and Disney films are still the ones that attract scores of children to theatres. So the team discussion on summer stories digressed into questions about what happened to live-action children’s films in India.

Manipuri film Boong, about a boy’s search for his father, isn’t exactly a children’s film, but won a BAFTA in the children’s category earlier this year. It was another reason for us to examine why we don’t make films solely for children in India even though we have a history of robust children’s filmmaking. Children’s cinema can open up whole worlds of wonder, apart from helping them build cognitive skills by thinking about the plot twists. The potential seems big, especially since minors make up more than a third of the country’s population, and adults too love children’s films, relating easily to the common themes of friendship, loyalty, love and togetherness.

Seasonal and new year specialties

March and April, or spring, is the season of new year observances across the country—from Ugadi and Gudi Padwa to Vishu and Poila Boishakh. Most of the delicacies prepared for the festivities are made from seasonal produce—fruits, flowers, roots and shoots that appear in these weeks. Rituparna Roy meets the chefs putting a spin on these traditional dishes. Read more.

A breakfast trail through Varanasi

In Varanasi, breakfast or a light morning meal is well entrenched in the culinary culture, and the language, idioms and music too reflects it. Numerous devotional songs, called kaleo, detail the morning rituals of waking Krishna up and feeding him breakfast. Cut fruits and raw vegetables are always part of the breakfast platter here and in the old city, you’ll see vendors pushing carts piled high with chopped apples, cucumbers, carrots and other seasonal offerings. Varanasi’s unique breakfast habits is one of the chapters of Priyadarshini Chatterjee’s book, First Bite: Breakfast Stories from Urban India, which addresses history, culture and migration through what people eat every morning. Read an excerpt.

Is the thinnest iPhone a collectible?

When the iPhone 17 range was released in November 2025, the phone that immediately set people talking was the iPhone Air. The thinnest iPhone ever divided opinion—was it just a gimmick or was it something people could use? Shouvik Das has a different view. The iPhone Air is a curiosity that isn’t just trying to bring slim phones back. It should be seen as a dry run for the imminent launch of the iPhone Fold, because Apple’s first foldable phone could take many cues from the Air. The thinnest iPhone could become a collectible. Read more.

Wristwatches of the Artemis II mission

Nasa’s Artemis II round-trip mission to the moon is an epochal event, over four decades since the last manned spaceflight to Earth’s satellite. Even after all these years, the one thing that hasn’t changed is the Omega Speedmaster’s presence on a moon mission as an official piece of astronaut kit. The latest mission too included Speedmasters, and an analogue-digital model seems to have been specially commissioned for the mission. Wristwatches have a long and interesting history of going into space, Bibek Bhattacharya writes. Read more.

Bringing that retreat feeling back home

Life at a wellness retreat is clockwork perfect: Days start early, meals arrive on time and sleep comes easily. This is hard to follow once you return to normal life where mornings begin with alarms and emails and “routine” feels dreary. Calm and peace feel like something that belongs to someone else’s life. Dinacharya, Ayurveda’s concept of daily rhythm, is the idea that the body works best when it moves in rhythm with light and dark, hunger and rest, activity and recovery. Replicating this routine at home isn’t impossible, writes Anushka Patodia, and makes suggestions after speaking to experts. Read more.