Akila Kannadasan

1 week ago | thehindu.com | Akila Kannadasan

If there is one thing that can best describe Chocko Choza’s core principle, it is defiance. Right from their refusal to add artificial colour to their red velvet cake to make it more attractive, to adding real strawberry pulp instead of the pinker, sweeter, synthetic syrup to their mocktails, it has been a journey of some difficult, yet fulfilling decisions.

2 weeks ago | thehindu.com | Akila Kannadasan

When Xavier Chandra Kumar first stepped into Vallalar Government Higher Secondary School in Kandamangalam, Viluppuram district as its principal, he knew he had his task cut out. “It was not a school,” he recalls. This was in January 2022. “Due to a road expansion project nearby, ten buildings were destroyed and there was no compound wall for the school,” recalls the 58-year-old.

2 weeks ago | thehindu.com | Akila Kannadasan

When Rajni George came back to her hometown of Kodaikanal after spending several years in Delhi and abroad, she was dismayed to see how much the hills had changed. “It really hit home how bad things were in our hill stations,” she says. “The older generation had done a lot to preserve our environment,” she feels, adding that this changed somewhere along the way. The Western Ghats, her home, was constantly in the news for the wrong reasons: landslides, over development, carrying capacity debate.

2 weeks ago | thehindu.com | Akila Kannadasan

We trek up a trail, on a hillock composed of damp, loose rock that cuts into finger millet fields, to reach Giri’s tile-roofed home. It is within the many folds of Erode district’s Bargur hills of the Western Ghats in Tamil Nadu. He is not home, but his goats are. “Women walk up this stretch with a pot of water balanced on their hips up to 10 times a day,” points out Madhu Manjari Selvaraj when we pause to catch our breaths near the goat shed.

3 weeks ago | thehindu.com | Akila Kannadasan

Apple milk, MaduraiNothing much has changed at Amsavalli Bhavan on Madurai’s East Veli Street ever since it was started 75 years ago. The hand-painted signboard, mosaic flooring, a narrow flight of stairs that leads one to the dim-lit air-conditioned dining room upstairs… In the 1970s, a new dish was added to its strictly non-vegetarian menu: apple mix, popularly known as apple milk or apple ice cream.