Based on primary survey of 500+ respondents and 10+ in-depth interviews | IIFT Team Kairos Case Study

How Korean Noodle Brands Captured the Indian Market

The Korean noodle story is not really about noodles. It is about what happens when cultural influence travels faster than commercial infrastructure and faster than regulatory awareness. India's Gen Z - and possibly that of other South Asian countries - did not wait for brands to tell them what to eat. They watched K-dramas, did spice challenges, and built market demand that brands, regulators, and consumer education campaigns have simply not kept up with.

Sufi, Spirit and Resistance: A Layered Work Grounded in South Asian Storytelling Traditions

The Sufi Storyteller speaks to a wider South Asian moment, where Sufi traditions are increasingly invoked as counterpoints to narrowing religious and cultural orthodoxies. By foregrounding storytelling as both a spiritual and political act, Mansab gestures toward the enduring power of narrative to sustain pluralism, recover marginalized voices, and imagine more expansive forms of belonging.

From Death to Immortality: The Mahabharata is Worth Reading - And Questioning

A young woman reading Draupadi's story today and feeling angry about it is not being irreverent. She is doing exactly what you are supposed to do with a text this old and this serious, which is to feel it in your own body and think hard about what it means for where you actually are. We do not honour the Mahabharata by protecting it from that. We honour it by continuing to argue with it

AI and Children: Proper Teaching of AI in Schools a Must to Fire Creativity

Recent evidence also suggests that AI chatbots are being used by teens to plan violence and other harmful activities. Like all technologies, AI is a double-edged sword. It can either be used for very creative work or destructive activities. Thus, there is a tremendous responsibility for teachers to teach the children and youngsters about the positive aspects of AI.

More on Medley

How deep dive in AI can help Mankind, but AI can't replace human intelligence

We are aware that the change in information is proportional to the total accumulative existing knowledge on a particular subject and hence this leads to its exponential growth.  Yet no matter how much the processing power of AI is, it will still remain bound by the existing knowledge and the environment which produced it. 

From Herat to Hyderabad, Jaffna to Jhapa, Young Voices Reimagine South Asia

Together, these voices converged on common ground: universal education, ecological cooperation, equitable trade, soft borders, and a revitalised SAARC that works for people rather than politics. Or, as one participant Ayesha Ahmed Quadri from India put it: “In the hands of South Asia lie the seeds of unity, compassion, peace, humility, and growth, ready to blossom beyond borders and history.”

A future without borders - where all exiles can be home

The poetry, essays, and the audio-visual montage accompanying Sarwar’s reading in California Plaza sought to bear witness to the long-term consequences of Radcliffe’s disinterested cartography. Nearly 80 years later, the India-Pakistan border still crackles with tension. Wars, cross-border strikes, and conflicts continue to scratch the scabs of Partition.

Kargil War remembered: A Tree Plantation Drive to Honour 527 Indian Army Personnel

This effort is especially moving, considering the magnitude of lives lost in the Kargil conflict. In the 77-day Operation Vijay, India lost 527 soldiers—more than the casualties in the 14-month-long 1947–48 Jammu & Kashmir war, the 23-day Indo-Pak war of 1965, or even the 13-day 1971 war that led to the liberation of Bangladesh.

Remembering Guru Dutt in his birth centenary year: A resurrected genius

While a deep and brooding darkness engulfed Guru Dutt in the last few years of his life, a glowing light is now being focused on his amazing body of work – from Baazi (1951) to Baharen Phir Bhi yengi which was incomplete when the filmmaker died and was completed by his team and released in 1966. 

The Bengal(i) Dilemma: Between Hope and Despair

Political parties, of course, have their numerical calculations in place, making ground-level behavioural changes irrelevant. Even in the past, it rarely mattered. Vote-bank politics continues to dominate, leaving the bhadralok—Bengal’s genteel middle class—in a quiet, uneasy dilemma.

Remembering A Musical Legend: Salil Chowdhury Left An Indelible Mark On South Asian Culture

Salilda was 27 when he achieved this break in 1952-53. Till his last day he never looked back. He composed music in 143 films, 75 of them in Hindi, 41 in Bengali and 27 in Malayalam. Besides, he composed music in 13 languages. He was adept at playing flute, piano, esraj and harmonium.  

Seeking Similarities In Otherness: A Pakistani-Origin Writer's Journey Across India

'The myriad stories one has heard about Indians and Pakistanis opening their homes and hearts to strangers from the other side seemed to belong to another age. One has heard many anecdotes of strangers being invited for meals into homes and not being charged for goods and services. For me, the number of such experiences was zero.’

Guru Dutt (1925 - 1964) : Unsung Auteur, Resurrected Genius

The most celebrated films in the Dutt oeuvre -  Pyaasa (1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), explored themes of unfulfilled love, societal alienation and the struggles of the human spirit, making him  the unsung  poet of Indian cinema. TIME magazine included Pyaasa in its ‘100 Best Films of All Time’

Why we sleep and dream?

Thus, to produce happy and productive dreams one needs to be active mentally and physically during waking hours. Whatever memories we make during daytime are reflected in our dreams, including prophetic dreams. Probably solution dreams of great inventors also came because of the very active prepared mind during waking hours.

Bangladeshi Women Fight Back Patriarchal Backlash: Need For Regional Solidarity Stressed

Shireen Huq, chair of the reform commission and founder of Naripokkho, said, “We had an uprising, a regime change, but the culture of misogyny, the brutalisation of women, and the public assertion of male dominance, all remain intact and hegemonic.”

Yoga in the Pacific: A Nautical Saga of Two Indian Navy Veterans, #AndhraPradeshyoga, #Telugus

The cceans, comprising 70 percent of the surface of planet earth, are  a medium of connecting peoples across the world, rather than at times mistakenly being viewed as great natural barriers. Nothing proves this more emphatically than the tiny Tystie's passage across the Indo-Pacific which is aptly relevant to this year's theme for the International Day of Yoga - 'Yoga for One Earth One Health'.

IMF At A Crossroads: Need For More Inclusive And Equitable System Of Financial Governance

To remain relevant, the IMF must undertake comprehensive reforms—revising its governance structure, enhancing decision-making transparency, and moderating its loan conditionalities. By expanding representation and reducing the dominance of a handful of powerful nations, the IMF can empower borrowing countries to shape policies that better reflect their unique economic challenges.    

Nature Of Discovery And The Pursuit Of Knowledge

All seekers of truth, no matter in which field, also tried to understand what makes our world and universe tick. That gave them a feeling of awe and also showed that probably what they thought was an original idea and thought was nothing else but existing knowledge in the knowledge space that was channeled through them.

Key to India’s prosperity lies in inculcating self-discipline in its people

The distribution of free food, freebies and subsidies by political parties has created massive idle energy across the country which breeds indiscipline. People abhor physical work, sell agricultural land and migrate to cities. They prefer to do menial jobs, live on rental income or bank interest than creating their own economic assets.