Jaideep Unudurti

In Montebello,you can roam with the elks,feast on chocolates and sleep with history at the famous Chateau.
Quebec,in an eastern corner of Canada,is a landscape of immensities,grain silos punctuating the horizons,a land crisscrossed by rivers and railroads. I am on a bus headed to the Chateau Montebello deep in the forests of the north. At first,the summer sky is grey and louring,still in a winter hangover. As the day progresses,the skies turn National Geographic blue.

Stammplatz. Your favourite table in a café. From the same people who got you schadenfreude and fernweh — the Germans, known for manufacturing words that encompass indefinable feelings and situations. As a tourist, returning to the same restaurant is a sign of admitting defeat. You are constantly propelled onwards, trying to feast on new experiences.

It all started innocuously enough, with Wombo, a text-to-image AI app that was all the rage in 2021. A friend of mine had been struggling with writing a novel, and to cheer her up, I “designed” a cover of her book, to make the goal more real. What the app generated was certainly a passable cover, potentially threatening the livelihood of cover designers and artists.
Still, I was not too worried about my own prospects. The arts were originally considered immune to the intrusions of machine int...

Theosophists believe in the Akashic Library, a record of every thought that has ever existed and will exist. It’s a cosmic library that pervades the universe. We are enmeshed in a similar record today, with the endless proliferation of memes, TikToks, posts, tweets, where every utterance or random thought that crosses our mind is immediately produced and then endlessly reproduced.
Amidst this easy replication, we might lose sight of the time when preserving the written word was a miracle. Whe...

These 'story papers', with their striking cover art and illustrations, speak of a world long dead
The time traveller in H.G. Wells’ famous novel, The Time Machine, stumbles upon the ruins of a library far into the future. After surveying the shelves, he notes, “What struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified."
Wells would have been gratified that thanks to Google Books and Project Gutenberg, a volunteer effort to di...

FUTURE HISTORIANS will perhaps call our times the Age of Superheroes. And Alan Moore is one of the makers of that universe. In the words of Michael Moorcock, he is “a modern urban shaman” of the 21st century, a “visionary who acts on behalf of the people, putting all its emotions, fears, hopes, and aspirations into words and pictures.” His CV, extraordinary as it is—Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, John Constantine (the DC Comics character)—doesn’t c...

Pragg’s rise is an outcome of the changes he has made to his game in the last one-and-a-half years or so. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)
In the end, we came close to a fairy-tale ending but not close enough. Even as the live feed crashed under the weight of over 150,000 people watching – an Eden Gardens stadium-worth of fans distributed across the globe – 18-year-old Grandmaster Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa went down to Magnus Carlsen in the final of the FIDE Chess World Cup. “Pragg” as he is univ...

In the 1970s, Dr Hans Winterberg, the director of the Max Mueller Bhavan in Hyderabad, wanted picture postcards to send to friends and family back home. Finding none, and being a keen photographer, he began shooting his own, seeking out monuments and landscapes. And then a fortuitous meeting with a professional German photographer, Thomas Lüttge led to a collaboration, with Hyderabad serving as their muse. As recounted by the editor, Heiko Sievers, “in endless car journeys, the duo roamed the...