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Anita Rao Kashi
Anita Rao Kashi
SCMP Contributor
Anita Rao Kashi is an independent lifestyle journalist based in Bangalore, India. Her articles have appeared in the BBC, Nikkei Asia, The National, The Times of India among others.

Bengaluru, formerly Bangalore, has seen a boom in creativity in art, music, theatre and food, making India’s Silicon Valley a beacon of culture and the only Indian city to join the World Cities Culture Forum.

A book club without the talking? Cubbon Reads is a community reading initiative that takes place in a park in India’s Bangalore – participants quietly read their books and there is no marketing. The idea has gone global.

A group of Indian start-ups are setting up tech-enabled toilets on the country’s highways, much to the relief of women travellers who often face dirty, unusable bathrooms while on the road.

Night walks for women by women in the Indian city of Bangalore are allowing groups to tread fearlessly on the most chaotic streets where alone the risk of harassment would be high.

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Vietnam’s much visited Halong Bay is chock full of cruise ships but a trip to Bai Tu Long Bay on its outer reaches provides an entrancing journey of karsts, caves and conservation.

One website is trying to surmount language barriers for sexual minorities in Asia by providing translations of resources about gay lifestyles usually found only in English.

Purposefully doing nothing, embodied by the Dutch word ‘niksen’, can lead to more creative thoughts and ideas, and help in de-stressing, experts say – though not everyone agrees.

Shocked at the widespread increase in searches for child porn during this year’s coronavirus lockdowns, a Singapore IT company is using AI to target paedophiles’ social media accounts with messages warning them to stop.

Nature sounds are as important as clean air and water for health, says an acoustic ecologist whose non-profit is seeking out the world’s quiet places, on land and sea, and in cities, in order to preserve them.

Email greetings have become a measure of goodwill amid Covid-19, and it’s important to be aware of how to manage the balancing act between showing empathy, sensitivity, concern and humour.

The name says it all – ‘A group where we all pretend to be ants in an ant colony’ (and everyone worships The Queen); experts say this Facebook group might be as helpful as it is fun during the Covid-19 pandemic.

WindowSwap, a website crowdsourced by a Singaporean couple showing videos taken from friends’ windows around the world, was an instant hit. Contributors from over 100 countries have since sent in videos to ease the misery of lockdown.