Asian Dispatch

For years, Chithra Devi* counted down the days until she could escape. Every morning, she woke up before dawn and walked into the tea fields of a privately owned estate in Sri Lanka’s Southern province. Every evening, she returned to a small house beside a fertiliser storage facility, where the smell of chemicals lingered in the air and breathing often became difficult. Chithra, a Malaiyaha Tamil worker, married to a Sinhalese worker employed at the same estate, had one goal: escape.

Before entering the Mawphlang Sacred Forest in Meghalaya, visitors are warned not to take anything out — not a leaf, not a stone, not even fallen wood. “Nothing is to be disturbed,” says Born, a stern-faced guide from the Khasi community, pausing beside a cluster of monoliths near the entrance. Then he turns and walks into the grove. Inside, the shift is immediate. The green canopy of towering oak, rudraksha, rhododendron and Khasi pine trees shuts out much of the sky in Mawphlang.

Sneha Mahale Sneha Mahale is a Mumbai-based journalist and editor who covers climate change, wildlife, health, technology, and culture. She specialises in long-form features, reported essays, and deeply researched stories that connect policy, people, and place.

For more than a decade, Meillyssa Chandra has worked as a general practitioner assessing whether people are fit to set sail. As the health examiner at the Maritime Occupational Health Center under Indonesia’s Transportation Ministry, she conducts medical checks for seafarers. These include eyesight and hearing, blood pressure, urine content, lung function, and even heart activity through an electrocardiogram (EKG). All seafarers must meet strict standards.

“SIS! BERAPA?,” a fish seller shouts out to marine biologist Dr Achier Chung. “Sister! How much are you offering?” He lifts a fish to the water surface. In his palm, the fish flaps its pectoral fin. Chung is at Semporna’s live seafood market, where most seafood is sold live, without price tags or weighing scales. Instead, sellers and buyers – largely tourists – negotiate through loud bargaining, hand gestures, and phone calculators.

News reports from early June suggest that countries like the United Kingdom and Canada are likely to announce restrictions on social media usage by teens. Australia’s decision to enforce a blanket ban on social media access for users under-16, making it among the first economically advanced democracies to do so, set off a wave of regulatory contagion of countries either attempting to enact or considering various grades of social media restrictions targeted at teenagers and children.

“We had planned to cook this feast on gas,” says Riyaz Ahmad, staring quietly at the dying embers nearby. “But given the shortage, I switched to firewood instead. It’s costing us almost double.” Riyaz Ahmad Anchari, 50, is, a waza, a traditional Kashmiri chef. In fact, he’s the head waza here, at a friend’s sister’s wedding. And he’s grappling with a till-now unforeseen problem. The war in Iran nearly 3,000 kilometres away is disrupting weddings in Kashmir. Earlier, the entire house seemed alive.

Hundreds gathered at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on Saturday, June 6, demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan in the wake of the alleged lapses in the CBSE’s on-screen marking (OSM) system and the NEET paper leak case. The protest, organised by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), saw a massive turnaround by midday and the crowd continued to swell as demand for accountability from the government in the Indian education system grew louder.