Our Executive Editor-in-Chief spends an evening inside the city’s most intriguing new bar, stepping into its CODE.LAB, and realising your drink has probably had a longer R&D process than most startups.

Across cultures, and particularly in India, women are still quietly fed the idea that they do not need to build power if they can align with it. That desirability, if leveraged well enough, can become mobility. That being chosen can replace becoming. It is a seductive narrative, reinforced by real social structures that reward proximity far more quickly than they reward independence.

From Delhi’s drawing rooms to Gaza’s fault lines, the world does not stop and the show goes. People across sectors still have to make ends meet.

How fashion functions as political messaging and why women leaders’ style in the West is granted appreciation yet faces scrutiny and moral policing in South Asian cultures.