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Most anti-dandruff shampoos are built around a simple and quietly dishonest promise: suppress the flakes and keep the customer coming back. The scalp gets stripped, the barrier breaks down, the fungal environment rebounds, and the cycle repeats. The Indian haircare market has been running on this loop for decades, and most people dealing with dandruff have simply accepted recurrence as part of the deal. Navdha by Nat Habit is built around a fundamentally different premise. Instead of seeing dandruff as just a fungal problem to be controlled, it looks at it as a biological imbalance in three systems at the same time: microbial activity, sebum regulation, and scalp barrier health. The active that works is 5% Beracyl, a proprietary complex derived from Daruharidra, amino acids, and coconut, which targets Malassezia through six simultaneous biological pathways rather than one. The brand's claim is that this multi-pathway approach makes fungal adaptation significantly harder, which is the reason conventional single-mechanism shampoos stop working overtime while this one should not. Supporting the Beracyl are ingredients with equally specific roles: neem to directly suppress fungal membranes; green tea GCG to regulate sebum production via 5-alpha reductase inhibition; bhringraj to calm inflammation and support barrier recovery; and lactic acid for gentle exfoliation while keeping scalp pH in the optimal range of 4.5 to 5.5. The entire formula is prepared fresh over 72 hours in what Nat Habit calls its Ayurvedic kitchen, with naturally derived saponins from Reetha and Shikakai doing the cleansing work in place of sulfates. Zero sulfates, zero silicones, and zero synthetic antifungals. We tested it on someone with a persistently flaky, reactive scalp who had cycled through the usual options without any lasting result. Three washes a week for two weeks, for a total of six washes. By the end of it, approximately 80 percent of the flaking had cleared. The scalp was calmer and noticeably less reactive, which is precisely where every conventional anti-dandruff shampoo tends to fail. Hair that had been frizzy and difficult to manage came out of each wash visibly shinier and easier to handle. One thing worth knowing before first use: the lather is greenish-yellow and significantly lighter than what most shampoo users are accustomed to. This is simply the natural saponins at work, and the brand is upfront about it. More practically, the lather is the clearest signal of whether hair has been rinsed thoroughly enough. Thorough rinsing here is not optional- it is the difference between the product working properly and not. Drench the hair well before application, and take your time rinsing out. The brand sits at a premium relative to mass-market anti-dandruff options. Relative to what it delivers and what it replaces, it is not expensive at all. Currently, this product has no competition in the Indian market for anyone dealing with dandruff seriously and unwilling to trade scalp health for short-term relief. Price: Rs. 445/= for 250ml Website: www.nathabit.in Publicist: Kaizzen

Walk into a well-designed office today and you will likely find something that looks less like a corporate floor plan and more like the lounge of a boutique hotel. Curved upholstered benches tucked into corners. Booth-style seating lining a collaboration zone. A plush banquette running along a glazed wall where employees sit with laptops, coffee, and unhurried conversation. It is a shift that anyone who has spent time in Indian offices over the last five years will have noticed, slowly at first, and then all at once. Banquette seating has long been rooted in hospitality. Restaurants use it to maximize space and keep people comfortable long enough to order dessert. Hotel lobbies use it to create atmosphere. Airport lounges use it to soften the hard edges of transit. For years, the workplace watched from a distance. Today, that distance has all but disappeared, and the reasons why say a great deal about how fundamentally the idea of the office has changed. To understand the shift, we spoke to Vamsidharr Setty, Managing Director India at The Senator Group, one of the world's largest office furniture manufacturers, who has spent over two decades watching how people relate to the spaces they work in. His view is that what looks like a design trend is actually a behavioral one. "The lines between work and hospitality have blurred, and offices have begun to soften," he told us. Desks are giving way to breakout spaces, while lounges and informal zones are increasingly balancing formal meeting rooms. What began as a design shift has now become a behavioral one. People no longer come into the office simply to sit at a desk; they come to collaborate, connect, and engage. And banquette seating has evolved alongside this shift, emerging as an effective way to support it." Vamsidharr Setty, Managing Director India at The Senator Group That context matters particularly in India, where the return-to-office conversation has played out with its own distinct intensity. Across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and NCR, organizations have had to reckon with a workforce that now has a genuine choice about where it works and has grown accustomed to exercising it. The office, in this environment, can no longer rely on obligation. It has to offer something worth showing up for. Increasingly, that something is not a desk but an experience, spaces that feel considered, social, and alive. Banquette seating, with its ability to define zones without walls and encourage people to linger, fits naturally into that ambition. What sets it apart from simply adding more soft seating, Setty argues, is a quality that is harder to manufacture: permanence. "Unlike loose furniture, it signals intent," he says. "It tells people that a space has been deliberately designed to be used, not just filled. It can transform underutilized corners into purposeful zones, bringing life to areas that might otherwise be overlooked. While it often requires a higher upfront investment than standalone furniture, the return is equally significant. It elevates perception, encourages use, and reflects a clear commitment to both employees and visitors." That word, commitment, is worth sitting with. A banquette is not something you wheel out for a rebrand and replace when the mood changes. It is a statement embedded in the architecture of a space. When it works, it tells everyone who enters, employee, client, or candidate, that this organization has thought carefully about how people should feel here. When it does not work, the failure is equally visible and considerably harder to undo. And it does go wrong, more often than it should. Setty is candid about this. "Banquette seating is still frequently misunderstood," he says. "Too often, it is treated as a joinery add-on rather than as furniture that demands ergonomic and functional precision. When poorly executed, the issues are immediate: incorrect seat depths, uncomfortable back heights, lack of ergonomic support, and missing elements such as power, lighting, and connectivity. The key lies in asking the right questions early. Who will use the space? How long will they sit there? Is it client-facing or internal? Will it support meetings, social interaction, focused work, or all three? Does it require integrated technology? Without these considerations, even the most visually appealing banquette will struggle to perform." It is a reminder that good workplace design is always downstream of good thinking about people. The aesthetic follows the brief, not the other way around. A banquette that looks beautiful in a render but leaves people with sore backs and nowhere to plug in their laptops is not good design; it is an expensive decoration. There is also a longer-term dimension to get right. Setty makes the point that a well-built banquette frame can outlast its upholstery by many years and that this should inform every decision made at the outset. "Features such as removable cushions, reupholstery options, and timeless aesthetics allow spaces to evolve without complete replacement. This approach supports sustainability in a practical way, accepting wear as inevitable while designing for renewal rather than disposal. A banquette should reflect a brand today without becoming dated tomorrow. Achieving that balance requires restraint, clarity, and an understanding of how workplaces evolve. Good design does not chase trends; it creates a foundation that can adapt." In that sense, the best banquettes are the ones you stop noticing after a while, not because they have faded into the background, but because they have become so naturally part of how a space works that their presence feels inevitable. That is a high bar. It requires the kind of integrated thinking about bodies, behaviour, brand, technology, and time that too few workplace projects make room for at the brief stage. But when it comes together, the result is something that goes well beyond a seating solution. "Banquette seating offers more than just an alternative to the task chair," Setty says. "It adds depth, flexibility, and character to a workplace, transforming spaces into environments that encourage interaction and collaboration. As organizations increasingly recognize that engagement drives performance, the role of thoughtfully designed, people-centric spaces becomes critical. Banquette seating is a clear expression of that shift, where design is not just about how a space looks but how effectively it works." That, perhaps, is the most useful frame for thinking about this trend. This is not just a hospitality aesthetic borrowed by corporate interiors; it is a physical expression of a more fundamental question that every organization is now being asked to answer: What is this office actually for? The answer, increasingly, is that it is for people, and the spaces that reflect that most honestly are the ones worth coming back to.

The What Is That series was designed to help very young children understand the world around them. The Why I Feel series is about something far more tender and complex. It is about helping them understand the world within them. Children feel emotions before they know the words for them. For a very young child, the space between feeling something deeply and knowing how to express it can be a lonely, confusing place. These five books, Why I Feel Sad, Why I Feel Scared, Why I Feel Happy, Why I Feel Nervous, and Why I Feel Bored, hit that gap dead center and give young children the language and the reassurance they need to start to understand what is happening in their own hearts. What Moonstone has learned in putting this series together is that emotional intelligence in young children is learned not through instruction but through recognition, through the profound relief of seeing your feeling mirrored back at you from a page, and knowing that it has a name, that other children feel it too, and that it is totally normal to feel this way. Each book in the series focuses on one emotion and explores it with the honesty and gentleness that very young readers need. The books never minimize what the child is feeling but always leave them with the feeling that it's manageable, temporary, and part of being human. It’s intriguing to pause and reflect on the selection of five emotions. It’s not the obvious five. Sadness and happiness are to be expected. It’s acceptable to be frightened. But the real ingenuity behind this series is shown in Nervous and Bored. Nervousness is one of the most common feelings of early childhood, the first day of school, a new place, and a new person, yet it is often overlooked and not given its own book, space, or validation. Even less often is boredom discussed, yet every parent knows that boredom in a young child is a real emotional experience that children struggle to name and manage. Including these two emotions alongside the more familiar ones indicates that the people behind this series were thinking carefully about what children really feel rather than what adults think they feel. The illustrations are warm and expressive, perfectly suited for the age group, and effectively convey the emotional weight of each book. The characters’ faces are drawn clearly enough that even the youngest reader can look at them and instantly recognize the feeling being portrayed, which is a deceptively challenging thing to illustrate and a mark of exceptional skill in the artist. The colors change depending on the emotional tone of each book—warmer and brighter in Why I Feel Happy, quieter and softer in Why I Feel Sad—and there is a visual intelligence in these decisions that works on the child even before the words have been read aloud. The books, like the What Is That series, are sturdy board books, with laminated pages that can withstand the handling of very young children and the spills that are bound to occur with that age group. This practical quality is as important to parents seeking books that will last through multiple children and readings as the content. The real power of the Why I Feel series is in the conversation that it sparks between parent and child. These books invite a shared reading, not a passive experience, each page a gentle nudge for a child to say, “Yes, I feel like that sometimes, too,” and for a parent to respond with the words that will make a fleeting feeling an understood and accepted part of life. In a world that's starting to see the importance of early emotional literacy for long-term well-being, these five little books are doing something really meaningful—in the most unpretentious, accessible, and loving way possible. The collection is a series that should be in every home with a two- to seven-year-old child and on the shelf of every nursery, playgroup, and early years classroom in the country. Title: Why I Feel Series Publisher: Moonstone- Rupa Publications. Availablility: Amazon, Flipkart, and at rupapublications.co.in.

Before discussing what works, let's first cover a little about the brand. Salve Pharmaceuticals has been a trusted name in pharmaceutical skincare in India, and Parasoft is one of its most established products, widely available across leading pharmacies and online. It is not a lifestyle skincare brand in the conventional sense. It is a dermatologist-tested, clinically formulated moisturizer built around one clear purpose: tackling dry, dehydrated, and compromised skin. The active ingredients are white soft paraffin and light liquid paraffin, which are occlusive agents that create a protective barrier on the skin's surface to keep moisture in and stop water loss. Glycerine draws water into the skin and helps retain it at the surface level. Aloe vera rounds out the formula with its soothing, anti-inflammatory, and healing properties, making the cream effective not just for everyday dryness but also for irritated, sensitive, or eczema-prone skin. What stands out immediately is the texture. For a cream this rich in emollients, it is surprisingly thick yet absorbs well. It spreads easily, settles into the skin without leaving a greasy film, and does exactly what it promises. We use it on the face, hands, and feet, and it has become a particular favorite for cracked heels, where the combination of paraffin and glycerine works noticeably well after even a few applications. The skin feels genuinely hydrated, not just coated on the surface. The cream is paraben-free, contains no added sensitizers, and is suitable for all skin types, including sensitive skin. It works through all seasons, whether the concern is summer dehydration, winter dryness, or the general toll of urban pollution on the skin barrier. For those who find most moisturizers either too light to make a real difference or too heavy to wear comfortably, Parasoft sits in a rare middle ground where efficacy and wearability coexist. If you have dry, flaky, or cracked skin and have been going back and forth on what to try, just go for this one. Available at: Leading pharmacies across India | Amazon www.salvepharma.com (The product was sent by the brand's communication partner, Orion PR.)

This review comes after three months of use, twice a week, and that timeline matters because it is long enough to say something meaningful. The Nat Habit Tri-Leaf Rosemary Summer Hair Oil is part of the brand's DASABUTI range, which is built on an authentic Ayurvedic preparation method where fresh herbs are slow-infused for over ten hours in cold-pressed oils. The summer variant features neem, curry leaves, and hibiscus as its main ingredients, along with rosemary and fifteen other strengthening herbs like brahmi, amla, and tulsi. The base oils are coconut, castor, mustard, and sunflower, all cold-pressed. The brand makes this fresh daily in what it calls its Ayurvedic Kitchen, which is a method, not just a marketing line, because you can genuinely tell the difference the moment you open the bottle. And that brings us to the first thing anyone will notice. The fragrance. It is extraordinary. The smell isn't heavy, medicinal, or slightly stale, which would put most people off oiling their hair. The fragrance smells almost like a body mist, is lightly sweet, calming, deeply pleasant, and lingers in a way that makes the whole experience feel more like a ritual than a chore. It is strong, but it is a wonderful kind of strong, the kind that makes you actually look forward to applying it. If the smell of hair oil has always made you skip it, this product is genuinely worth trying. The texture is light and non-sticky, which for an oil packed with castor and coconut is worth noting. It does not weigh the hair down or leave that heavy, coated feeling on the scalp. It spreads easily, massages in well, and sits comfortably whether you leave it on for a few hours or overnight, which is what we recommend for best results before washing it off. Three months in, twice a week, the hair feels stronger, the scalp calmer, and the results are consistent with what Nat Habit has built its reputation around. The brand lives up to it. Price: 470/= for 200 ml (after discount) Available at: nathabit.in Publicist: Kaizzen

Five beverages that predate the wine list by centuries and have been waiting for the world to catch up. Sometime in the sixteenth century, when Hernan Cortes sat at the court of Moctezuma and watched a cold, frothed drink made from ground cacao, water, chili, and vanilla being poured repeatedly between vessels from a height to produce its foam, he found it bitter and strange and largely unimpressive. He added sugar, applied heat, called it chocolate, and carried it back to Europe, where it became something considerably simpler than what it had been. The civilization he encountered had been drinking it for two thousand years. It had taken them that long to understand it properly. This is, in miniature, the history of how the West has consistently related to the drinking cultures of the rest of the world. It encounters something ancient and complex, finds it unfamiliar, adjusts it toward comfort and familiarity, and then congratulates itself on the discovery. The five beverages that follow have been waiting at various points in history for someone to stop altering them. They are not wellness products, and they are not alternatives to alcohol. They are complete civilizations in a glass, each one the product of more accumulated knowledge and more patient human labor than almost any luxury object the contemporary market has thought to take seriously. Mitti Attar in Water, Kannauj, India In early June, before the monsoon breaks over the Gangetic plain of Uttar Pradesh, the earth is so dry that it has become a specific kind of silence. When the first rain falls on that earth, something rises from it—mineral, warm, geological, with no equivalent in any flavor vocabulary built for temperate climates. In Kannauj, the perfume capital of India, they have been capturing that moment in a bottle for over four hundred years. Mitti attar begins with Gangetic alluvial clay, baked in wood-fired kilns until it is dry and porous and concentrated with the mineral signature of that specific landscape. The baked clay goes into copper degs—large distillation pots sealed with clay and cotton—and hydrodistilled with water over fires of wood and cow dung whose temperature the craftsmen regulate entirely by observation and touch, as their fathers did and their fathers before them. The vapor travels through bamboo pipes into a receiving vessel called a bhapka, which holds aged sandalwood oil. The sandalwood absorbs and holds the distillate. The process takes days. The aging takes months. The Mughal courts dissolved mitti attar in water and drank it, not as medicine, not as ritual, but as pleasure. One drop in a glass of cool water places you immediately inside the experience of rain on dry earth, regardless of where you are or what season surrounds you. The flavor sits outside every category that conventional beverage criticism was built to address. It is not sweet, not bitter, and not sour. It is geological. It is the taste of a specific landscape at a specific moment, preserved and carried forward by people who understood that some experiences are worth the labor of capturing. The families in Kannauj who still work the traditional degh-bhapka method are becoming fewer. Gas-powered alternatives are faster and cheaper and produce something that most noses cannot distinguish from the original. Finding genuinely traditional mitti attar requires knowing who to ask and being prepared to pay what the labor is actually worth. That price is, by any measure, modest relative to what the knowledge behind it has cost to preserve. Ceremonial Matcha, Uji, Japan The preparation of a bowl of ceremonial matcha in the Japanese tea tradition takes approximately forty-five minutes. The guest drinks it in three and a half sips. That ratio of forty-five minutes of preparation to three and a half sips of consumption is not inefficiency. It is a philosophical position about what drinking is for. Uji, south of Kyoto along the river of the same name, has been producing the finest green tea in Japan since the twelfth century, when the monk Eisai returned from China with seeds and the knowledge of how to cultivate them. The terroir of Uji, clay soil, morning mists from the river, and a microclimate of specific precision produce a leaf with concentrations of L-theanine, the amino acid responsible for the particular quality of calm alertness that distinguishes fine matcha from every imitation of it, that no other growing region has managed to replicate at the same level. The best ceremonial grade matcha comes from specific tea plants—Okumidori, Samidori, and Uji Hikari—that are grown in the shade under special canopies for three to four weeks before they are harvested, which makes the plants produce more chlorophyll and amino acids in their leaves. The first harvest of late April and early May, called Ichibancha, produces the most prized leaves. These are steamed immediately after picking, dried, stripped of stems and veins to produce tencha, and stone-ground at temperatures maintained below twenty-five degrees Celsius because heat damages the amino acids and compromises everything into a powder so fine that one hour of milling produces thirty grams. Fewer than a dozen families in Uji still produce matcha at this level of specificity. A bowl prepared correctly, with water heated to seventy degrees in a warmed ceramic vessel and whisked in a W-shaped motion until the foam is uniform and dense, is experienced in the throat and chest as much as on the tongue. The calm that follows is not metaphorical. The L-theanine is real, the effect is measurable, and the experience of drinking something made with this degree of accumulated care is something that reorganizes, quietly and permanently, your understanding of what a beverage can communicate. Tepache, Oaxaca, Mexico Long before the Spanish arrived with their distillation equipment and their sugar, the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica had been fermenting pineapple rinds in clay vessels with piloncillo and cinnamon and cloves for longer than anyone has determined with certainty. The result—tepache—is one of the oldest continuously produced fermented beverages in the Americas. Mildly probiotic, gently effervescent, with a complexity that shifts depending on the pineapple variety, the mineral content of the local water, the temperature and duration of fermentation, and the specific blend of spices used. In its finest form, produced by families in Oaxaca and the Valley of Mexico who have been making it the same way for generations, tepache bears no resemblance to the pasteurized approximations that have recently appeared in health food stores and wellness cafes. Pasteurization kills the living cultures that give genuine tepache its particular quality of aliveness on the palate, a slight tang that is not exactly sourness but something closer to the sensation of fermentation itself, the sense that what you are drinking is still in the process of becoming what it is. A glass of properly made tepache, consumed within two to three days of preparation, has never been fully still and will not survive long enough to become so. The Oaxacan producers who take tepache most seriously source their pineapples from specific family farms in the tropical lowlands, where varieties unavailable commercially, with dramatically higher sugar content and more complex aromatic compounds, are grown specifically for fermentation. The rinds and cores are used whole. Fermentation time is measured not in hours but in sensory observation—color, aroma, the behavior of the surface, and the particular sound the liquid makes when disturbed. This knowledge is not written down anywhere. It lives in the hands and the noses of the people who have been doing it their entire lives, and it cannot be approximated by anyone who has not. Sikhye, Korea Every significant Korean meal ends with sikhye. It arrives cold and mildly sweet, with a few grains of cooked rice floating on its surface and occasionally a slice of persimmon. It serves as a digestive aid, a conclusion to the meal, and a punctuation mark—a signal that the meal is complete, the body has received what it needed, and stillness is now appropriate. The finest sikhye is made with rice varieties specific to particular Korean regions, malted barley prepared through a process requiring precise temperature control over an extended period, and spring water whose mineral content the most experienced producers can taste and adjust for. Fermentation takes between eight and twelve hours at a specific temperature that allows the enzymes in the malt to convert the starches in the rice into maltose—a sugar with a flavor profile considerably more subtle than refined sugar, carrying what the Korean vocabulary of taste calls "danseok," the sweetness of grains, a quality that has no direct equivalent in European flavor language. The result, when made correctly, is barely sweet and faintly alive, gently effervescent from the activity of its living cultures, with a depth that reveals itself across multiple sips rather than announcing itself immediately. Buddhist temple kitchens in Korea have been producing sikhye using essentially the same method for over a thousand years. The temple versions, made with particular attention to water quality, rice variety, and the season of production, are considered by Korean food scholars to be among the most refined fermented beverage traditions in any culture. They are not exported. They are not commercially available. They exist in the kitchens of specific temples and in the homes of families who learned to make them properly, and they are drunk in the context of meals that understand exactly what a beverage is for. Drinking Chocolate, Sava Region, Madagascar, and Oaxaca, Mexico What Cortes encountered at the court of Moctezuma and found unimpressive has, in the hands of a small number of serious producers in Madagascar and Oaxaca, returned to something the sixteenth-century Aztec court would have recognized as its own. Single-origin drinking chocolate made from Criollo and Trinitario cacao beans grown in Madagascar's Sava region—stone-ground without added sugar or emulsifiers, mixed with water at seventy degrees, and whisked to the consistency of cream—is a beverage of such density of flavor that one hundred and twenty milliliters is entirely sufficient. The bitterness is not harsh but structural, the way the bitterness of a great espresso is structural, a framework that holds complexity rather than an obstacle to pleasure. The flavor changes as it cools. It is worth paying attention to both temperatures. In Oaxaca, the tradition of tejate—a pre-Columbian drink made from ground cacao, maize, the seeds of the mamey sapote fruit, and rosita de cacao, a flower that grows only in this region and contributes a flavor with no equivalent anywhere in the European food vocabulary—is produced by a small number of women in the markets of Oaxaca City and surrounding villages who have been making it the same way for generations. It is mixed by hand, cold, and worked until it produces a thick white foam served on top of the darker liquid below. The technique of producing that foam is not taught in any culinary school. The knowledge of this technique is passed among women who have been observing and learning since childhood, reflecting how valuable knowledge has traditionally been shared in the world—not through institutions, but through attention, proximity, and time. What Is Actually at Stake Each of the five beverages in this feature is, in its finest form, facing some version of the same pressure. The degh-bhapka families of Kannauj are fewer than they were a generation ago. The stone mills of Uji run for fewer hours each year. The women who make tejate in the markets of Oaxaca are not young. The Buddhist temple kitchens that produce the most refined sikhye do not advertise. The cacao farmers of the Sava region sell to whoever offers the best price that season, which is not always the person who will do the most with what they have grown. None of this is inevitable. It is simply what happens when the world ignores the important things. The most honest definition of luxury is not what something costs. Luxury is what it would cost to replace something if it were gone—and whether it could even be replaced. By that definition, a bowl of properly made sikhye from a Korean temple kitchen, or a glass of water holding one drop of traditionally distilled mitti attar, or a cup of tejate mixed by hand in an Oaxacan market at seven in the morning, is among the most luxurious things available to anyone on earth right now. The question is simply whether you know to ask for it. (Style Essentials covers beverage culture on entirely independent editorial terms.)

Scavolini's Stilo, designed by Spalvieri & Del Ciotto, is a whole-home system that runs from kitchen through the living area to the bathroom within a single coherent design language, premised on the idea that the contemporary home no longer organizes itself around fixed single-purpose rooms but around spaces that shift function across the day. The kitchen is the system's starting point and is treated as the social heart of the home rather than a functional zone, with large sculptural islands as the defining element. Each island features a sliding covering top that conceals the cooking and washing areas when closed, turning the work surface into a piece of furniture when it is not in active use. Wall-mounted units, storage cabinets, display cases, and open elements extend outward from the island, with a material and finish selection broad enough to make the system customizable across different spatial configurations. The cylinder is the design decision that holds all of it together. Spalvieri & Del Ciotto have deployed this single geometric form horizontally and vertically throughout Stilo as handles, shelves, desks, lighting bars, and equipped rails for organizing utensils, so the same detail appears whether you are looking at the kitchen, the living area, or the bathroom. Available in black and titanium finishes, the cylinder reads differently in each: bolder and more architecturally weighted in black, lighter and more balanced in titanium, giving homeowners a choice that shifts the character of a space without altering its underlying design logic. Stilo is Scavolini's argument that compositional continuity across the entire home is a functional consideration as much as a stylistic one and that a system rigorous enough in its design language to hold together across kitchen, living, bathroom, and home office gives the contemporary home a coherent framework that individual room-by-room furnishing decisions cannot.

When five books arrived together as a series for review, my son, who has strong opinions about everything that lands in our home for the books section, took one look at them and immediately said, "These are not for me; these are for the babies." He was right, and he said it with the kind of affectionate authority that older children reserve for things they have quietly outgrown but still remember with great fondness. The What Is That? series by Moonstone, Rupa Publications' children's imprint, warmly caters to children aged one to four, addressing their developmental needs with impressive clarity. The series arrives as a set of five books covering five of the first things a very young child begins to make sense of in the world around them: animals, numbers, colours, vehicles, and weather. Each title asks a simple, direct question on its cover: What Animal Is That? What Number Is That? What Colour Is That? What Vehicle Is That? and What's the Weather Today? and the books then answer those questions with the kind of joyful, unhurried confidence that only the best early learning books manage to carry off without feeling like a classroom exercise. The first thing you notice, before opening a single page, is how beautifully these books are made. The pages are thick, sturdy board, the kind that survives the enthusiastic handling of a one-year-old without buckling, tearing, or losing its shape after the fifth reading of the day. Better still, the pages are laminated, which means that the inevitable encounters with sticky fingers, spilled drinks, and the occasional enthusiastic crayon are not the end of the world. Parents of young children recognize the value of durable books, as those that withstand early childhood reading are more likely to be enjoyed and fulfill their purpose. The illustrations are where the series truly earns its place in a young child's library, and they are everything a book for this age group should be: bright, bold, clear, and full of the kind of cheerful energy that makes a small child want to point and name and point again. Every image is drawn with a warmth that feels genuinely affectionate toward its young audience, and the colors are rich and saturated without being overwhelming, chosen with the understanding that very young children are drawn to vivid, clear visual information rather than the subtle and the nuanced. My artistic son praised the clean and happy drawings after reviewing several titles. The learning built into each book is exactly right for the age group. Everything is unhurried, uncluttered, and tailored to what a young child can reasonably absorb at once. Animals, numbers, colours, vehicles, and weather are not arbitrary choices. They are the five categories of knowledge that a child between one and four encounters and asks questions about every single day, which means that these books do not sit apart from a child's world but sit right inside it, giving language and image to things the child is already noticing and already curious about. What Moonstone has produced here is a series that takes its young readers seriously, that invests in beautiful production, thoughtful illustration, and genuinely age-appropriate learning, and that will be reached for again and again precisely because it is so pleasurable to hold, to open, and to read aloud. For parents seeking well-made, well-conceived early learning books, this series is easy to recommend. Available on Amazon and at rupapublications.co.in

In a market that worships familiarity, Vanesha Majithia came home to Ahmedabad and built something India had never quite seen: a fragrance house that curates the world's most uncompromising scents and asks its customers to trust her completely. So far, they are. Vanesha Majithia will tell you that the idea for Luvih was not born in a single moment of clarity. But if you insist on her, there is one thing she keeps coming back to, standing in a concept store in New York on a quiet weekend afternoon, smelling something deliberately strange, something that made no attempt to be liked, and realizing that this refusal was the most interesting thing she had ever encountered in a bottle. She was working at Estée Lauder at the time. She is a Columbia graduate, a neuroscience undergraduate from Emory, and someone who has trained herself to look at systems and understand how they work from the inside. The job gave her exactly that- the interior logic of how beauty brands are built and how emotion is packaged and positioned and sold at scale. She was good at it. She was also spending her weekends in places like Le Labo and Aesop, not buying anything, just being there, in spaces where fragrance was treated as a point of view rather than a product. The contrast between those two worlds did not escape her. It sharpened into something she could not unfeel. She moved back to India and looked at the fragrance landscape with that sharpness intact. What she saw was a market built almost entirely on familiarity, like designer names, mass-market bottles, two categories, and nothing in between. The world she had been quietly inhabiting in New York, niche perfumery with genuine aesthetic conviction and a willingness to be unlikeable, did not exist here in any recognizable form. It was a gap so large she could not look away from it. When she told people around her what she was planning to build, she got polite confusion. Most of them simply did not have a frame for it, but she followed her heart. Luvih was launched digitally, self-funded, with Vanesha in full creative and operational control. Its proposition is both simple and uncompromising- true luxury is a curation, not abundance. Every fragrance on the platform has earned its place through a selection process she describes as layered and, with a hint of amusement, a little obsessive. She begins wide, moving through sometimes entire collections just to understand a brand's language. The first pass is instinctive. Whatever makes her pause goes forward. Then she lives with the shortlist, wearing things on different days, in different moods, returning to them over weeks. The question she keeps asking is not whether she likes something. It is whether she keeps thinking about it when it is no longer on her skin. Only a few make it through. Or Cashmere from Uermi is the kind of find that exemplifies what she is looking for. You approach it expecting warmth and softness, expecting it to behave the way its name promises. It is instead more gourmand, richer, and more textured, quietly contradicting every expectation. That small refusal to be predictable is the quality she will always choose over easy beauty. The Antiqua compositions do something similar but more confrontational- florals that arrive dry and slightly smoky where you expected something romantic, that make people say they do not know how they feel yet, and then pull those same people back again and again. She does not find this troubling. She finds it the most interesting thing a fragrance can do. Comfort, she believes, is the least interesting thing to sell. The trust problem is real, and she does not minimize it. She is asking someone to spend significantly more than they would on a name they recognize, on a fragrance from a house they have never heard of, for a scent they cannot experience until it is actually on their skin. There is no workaround for the fundamental intangibility of what she sells. Her answer has been to build around the gap rather than pretend it is not there- curation precise enough to function as a guarantee, storytelling that helps someone imagine how a fragrance will feel before they have felt it, and consistency delivered quietly over time until trust becomes the default. Every introduction Luvih makes is built on this logic. Uermi came in alongside Baro Art. L'eau Maliz arrived with Scarlett House. Antiqua with uncut jewelry. The most unexpectedly beautiful thing she has smelled recently is Chapter 3 Church Bells from L'eau Maliz. Mineral, almost metallic, with a current of soft incense running underneath it, cool and spacious and yet quietly warm, sitting in a register she struggles to name because it does not belong to any existing category. It arrives like air moving through a particular kind of space. OH Denim from Uermi surprised her differently. Tuberose, which is usually bold and emphatic and dressed up, is placed instead in a completely casual context, a little green, a touch of spice, and a musky woody base that softens it into something worn-in, like a floral that has been faded into fabric over months. In both cases, what moves her is the same thing: a note taken entirely out of its expected setting and made to feel different but completely natural. She thinks a lot about what growing up in India does to how you smell the world, and she believes the effect is real even if it goes largely unnamed. Scent in India is not subtle. It is layered and constant and emotionally loaded-incense, spices, temple flowers, festival food, all of it present and overlapping from childhood. The comfort with intensity and complexity that builds from that immersion is something she does not think can be fully replicated by someone who grew up without it. Notes that might feel overwhelming elsewhere feel like home here. But New York gave her the other register, restraint and the power of what is deliberately withheld, and her taste now lives between those two places. So does Luvih's. She sees the niche fragrance consumer in India forming in real time, and what interests her is that they are almost never arriving from a fragrance-first perspective. They come from fashion, from design, from art, from hospitality. They have an aesthetic sensibility already, and fragrance becomes its extension. They may not know the technical vocabulary, but they know exactly what they are drawn to and, perhaps more importantly, what they are not. She can feel a shift happening beneath the surface, away from wearing fragrance for recognition and toward wearing it for self-expression. From what is this, toward this feels like me. India's own fragrance heritage is something she speaks about with a particular mixture of pride and frustration. The tradition is ancient and sophisticated: attar from Kannauj, hydrodistillation, and raw materials of extraordinary quality. And yet for decades the Indian consumer reached instinctively for the international name. She understands why. International fragrance was positioned as aspirational, as imagery, and as modern luxury in a form that felt globally legible. Attar remained embedded in ritual and culture but was never translated for a contemporary audience. The storytelling gap was the real problem. The heritage was always there. The framing was missing. The ingredient she would most want to place in the global niche perfumery conversation is mitti attar- the scent of the first rain on dry earth. It is not pretty. It is earthy and raw and mineral. But it does not feel like an interpretation of anything. It feels like a memory. She believes the global fragrance conversation has not yet understood what it could do with that. Luxury, in her definition, is a fragrance that is not trying to be liked by everyone. One that has not been softened or adjusted to maximize its appeal and that is allowed to be exactly what it is without needing to explain itself. It is also about time: how much went into making it and how much the wearer is willing to give it in return. And it is about specificity. The most luxurious thing you can wear is something that does not feel interchangeable, something that is, in some way that cannot be entirely explained, yours. In five years she wants Luvih to feel sharper, not larger. More defined, more experiential, and more global in reach but more precise in perspective. She admires Victoria Beckham for exactly this quality- the discipline to evolve without diluting, to become more exactly yourself over time rather than more accommodating. Curation will remain at the center. Scale for its own sake is not part of the plan. What she would feel if an Indian niche perfumery house entered the global conversation alongside Byredo or Le Labo or Frederic Malle is not something she describes as pride. She calls it momentum. Because once that happens, once an Indian house becomes part of that vocabulary rather than an interesting exception to it, it stops being anomalous and starts being the beginning of something. Other voices come through. Other interpretations. The door, once opened, stays open. That, she says, is what would matter most. She is not waiting for validation. She is waiting for the moment an Indian fragrance house sits in the same conversation as Byredo or Le Labo and nobody finds it surprising. Not because of what it would mean for Luvih. Because of what it would mean for everyone who comes after. The door, once opened, stays open. That is what she is actually building toward. www.luvih.com

Maximilian Büsser of MB&F Before he built MB&F, Maximilian Büsser grew Harry Winston's watchmaking revenue tenfold, ran one of the most coveted jobs in Swiss horology, and was, by every visible measure, exactly where a career like his was supposed to end up. He walked away anyway. Twenty years on, his pieces sell at Christie's for over half a million dollars, Chanel holds a stake in his company, and the industry that once had no category for what he was making now considers him among the most significant independent watchmakers alive. We spoke to him about pride, creative courage, and the only compass he has ever followed. The question that matters most about Maximilian Büsser is not why he eventually built MB&F but why, having built a career of genuine institutional distinction, he chose to walk away from it at the moment when most people in his position would have stayed. He had grown Harry Winston Rare Timepieces from eight million dollars in revenue to eighty million over seven years as its CEO, a performance that would have justified staying indefinitely and collecting whatever recognition and compensation came with it. He had created the Opus series there, a groundbreaking collection of ultra-complicated mechanical watches made in collaboration with the world's most respected independent watchmakers, which became the direct creative precursor to everything MB&F would eventually become. He was, in other words, not leaving because he had failed or because the institutions had failed him. He was leaving from the summit of precisely the career those institutions had promised, because from the summit the view had become uncomfortable in ways he could no longer ignore. He studied micro technology engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, graduating in 1991 with every intention of joining the kind of large international corporation that engineering from a Swiss federal polytechnic was supposed to deliver. It was Henry-John Belmont, the then-CEO of Jaeger-LeCoultre, who redirected that trajectory with a question that Büsser has never forgotten. Did he want to be one among 200,000 in a big corporation, Belmont asked, or among the four or five of us who can save this beautiful company? He joined Jaeger-LeCoultre. Seven years later he was headhunted to run Harry Winston. And then, in 2005, at the age of thirty-eight, he left to build something the watchmaking world had no vocabulary for. "I had become a marketer," he says, "and at some point I hated myself for it. I felt disconnected from what I truly believed in." "I had become a marketer, and at some point I hated myself for it. I felt disconnected from what I truly believed in." What followed was not a strategic reinvention or a carefully managed transition but something considerably more personal and more costly than either of those things. He left, and then he built MB&F, which stands for Max Büsser and Friends, a name that no brand consultant would have arrived at and that is deliberately, almost defiantly, free of institutional authority. It announces from its very first letter that what you are dealing with is a person rather than a corporation, and that this person has chosen to build in the company of others rather than in the isolation that founding ego so often demands. Büsser has deliberately capped the MB&F headcount at twenty people, a decision rooted in a conviction that management layers are actively detrimental to creativity and that keeping the organization small enough to remain genuinely alive is itself a form of creative discipline. The majority of the brand's watches sell for upwards of fifty thousand dollars. The most significant auction results approach seven figures. In 2022, the LM Sequential EVO won the Aiguille d'Or at the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève, the highest prize in watchmaking. In 2024, Chanel acquired a twenty-five percent stake in the company. Büsser retains the majority and, more importantly, complete creative control. None of that was predictable in 2005, and he does not pretend otherwise. The early years of MB&F were not, despite the recognition that eventually came, a period of straightforward progress. Building something independent on an unconventional premise inside a profoundly conservative industry carries a weight that institutional careers are specifically designed to protect people from, and Büsser does not romanticize what those years actually felt like from the inside. There were stretches of genuine doubt, periods when the path felt uncertain in ways that went beyond the romantic uncertainty of the bold creative venture and became simply uncomfortable. "When you start something independent, uncertainty is part of the journey," he says. "There were times when things felt very fragile." What sustained him through those periods was not external validation or market traction or the reassurance of peers, but something far more immediate. Finishing a piece and watching the emotion it produced in the person encountering it for the first time. That feeling, he says, was always sufficient to continue. The name matters, and so does the philosophy embedded in it. Collaboration has never been for Büsser a practical necessity but a belief, a conviction that creative work reaches places in the company of different intelligences that it cannot reach alone. "Collaboration takes you to places you could never reach alone," he says. "Every Friend brings a different sensitivity, a different expertise, a different way of seeing the world. When those perspectives meet, something unexpected often happens — and that's usually where the magic is." The Friends over the years have included some of the most respected independent watchmakers and designers working in the field, each collaboration producing something that neither party could have arrived at independently, which is the precise definition of what Büsser means by the word. "We never start by asking what the market wants or what the trends are. That would be the fastest way to lose our soul." Büsser trained as an engineer rather than a watchmaker, and that distinction runs through everything MB&F has produced in ways that are not immediately obvious but become impossible to ignore once understood. A watchmaker begins from centuries of accumulated form and tradition, from the inherited assumption of what a watch is and what it is for, and works forward from that foundation. An engineer begins from the problem, or in his case, from the dream. The pieces that have emerged from the M.A.D. House, MB&F's atelier in the Carouge neighborhood of Geneva, have been described as spacecraft, as sculptures, as science fiction made material, and all of those descriptions are partially accurate and entirely insufficient at the same time. They tell time. But time, as Büsser frames it, has become part of the narrative of what MB&F makes rather than its organizing purpose. "What fascinated me more was the machine itself," he says, "its architecture, the way it moves, the emotion it can create." The timekeeping is real and precise and entirely non-negotiable. It is simply no longer the point around which everything else arranges itself. What the organizing principle actually is, if you spend enough time with him, turns out to be something he has carried since childhood. Spaceships. Strange machines. The science fiction of a boy who had not yet been told what was and was not possible, and who, crucially, never entirely agreed to update that position as adulthood and professional life came to claim their usual territory. His mother was a Parsi Zoroastrian, and he has spoken in other contexts of her profound influence on the person he became, on the particular quality of conviction and stubbornness with which he has pursued his own path rather than the one laid out for him. Many people carry vivid memories of what captivated them at ten years old. Very few build an entire creative enterprise around the refusal to leave it behind. "I think MB&F is in many ways a continuation of those childhood dreams," he says, and what is striking about the statement is its literalness. He is not speaking poetically about maintaining a sense of wonder. He is describing a direct and unbroken line between a boy's imagination and the objects currently being assembled in his atelier, a line that was never severed because he made a succession of choices, at significant personal and professional cost, to protect it. Protecting it requires navigating a tension that would be paralysing for most people working in any precision discipline. Watchmaking operates at tolerances that are microscopic and unforgiving, where the consequences of approximation are permanent and visible in the finished object. Creativity, as Büsser has learned to practise it across two decades of MB&F, almost never begins from precision. It begins somewhere considerably looser and stranger, sometimes in a direction that remains entirely impractical until quite suddenly it does not. "It usually begins with something quite free — sometimes even a little crazy," he says. "The challenge is to protect that freedom while making sure the final machine works perfectly." What he is describing is not a compromise between imagination and engineering but a deliberate and hard-won sequencing of them, a discipline of allowing the dream to run ahead for as long as possible before the rigour catches up to make it real. Protecting the beginning, in his telling, is the hardest part of the entire process. The engineering problems, however complex, can eventually be solved through application and expertise. The original impulse, once surrendered to caution, almost never returns in the same form. "Success can easily make you comfortable, and comfort is dangerous for creativity." In 2011, Büsser founded the first M.A.D. Gallery in Geneva, a physical argument that the objects MB&F produces belong in an art context as naturally as a horological one. M.A.D. stands for Mechanical Art Devices. The gallery displays MB&F machines alongside kinetic art from makers around the world, and the proposition it embodies, that these objects are a form of sculpture as much as they are a form of watchmaking, has since been extended to locations in Dubai, Taipei and Hong Kong. Büsser himself has lived in Dubai since 2014. In 2018, he was awarded the Prix Gaïa Spirit of Enterprise by the Fondation du Musée d'Horlogerie, the watchmaking industry's recognition that what he had built represented not just creative achievement but a genuinely new way of conceiving what a watch company could be. What success means to him has shifted considerably over the two decades since MB&F's founding, and the direction of that shift is not what one might expect. In the beginning it meant survival and proof of concept, evidence that the idea could exist in the world and find its people. Today, with Chanel as a minority partner and pieces commanding serious auction results, it means something that requires more vigilance rather than less. "It means protecting the creative spirit of MB&F," he says, "and continuing to create things we genuinely believe in." The risk he is most alert to now is not failure in any conventional sense but the particular kind of creative erosion that success alone can produce. Comfort. The way an enterprise that has proven itself can begin to inhabit what it already knows how to do, rounding off the edges that gave it its particular energy in the first place. "Success can easily make you comfortable," he says, "and comfort is dangerous for creativity." The market, throughout all of this, is not a compass he consults, and never has been. "We never start by asking what the market wants or what the trends are," he says. "That would be the fastest way to lose our soul. We simply try to create objects that we love and that we are proud of. If we believe something deserves to exist, we build it. That's really the only compass we follow." This produces, as a natural consequence rather than a positioning strategy, objects that do not belong to any particular moment or trend cycle. They exist outside the time of their making while being, in every technical and material sense, entirely and precisely about time itself, a paradox he appears to find more generative than troubling. How future generations will understand the work, separated from the conversations and context in which it was made, is a question he holds without apparent anxiety. "I don't try to control how our work will be interpreted in the future," he says. "I simply hope that people will still feel the sincerity behind these pieces — that they were created with passion and honesty." Curiosity, he says, remains the primary driver. Not the management of a legacy or the stewardship of a reputation built over twenty years, but the active desire to explore, to experiment, and to sit inside the genuine possibility of failing rather than at a careful distance from it. Alongside that now sits a sense of responsibility toward the people within the laboratory, toward the collaborators whose creative trust he holds, toward the community of collectors he calls the Tribe, who have followed MB&F since the first Horological Machine appeared in 2007. But it is the curiosity that initiates each new thing, and it is pride, that original and uncomplicated goal he set for himself at the very beginning, that tells him when the thing is finished. He hopes, when the work is eventually encountered by people who know nothing of how or why or by whom it was made, that it will function as an argument. Not for any particular aesthetic position or technical achievement, but for something more fundamental. "The reason MB&F exists," he says, "is to inspire people to follow their own path — to take more risks, to think differently, and hopefully to find their own true north." It is a generous ambition for a laboratory whose pieces begin at fifty thousand dollars and exist in editions small enough to make them genuinely rare. But the argument MB&F makes has never been contained in the price or the exclusivity or the auction result. It has always been contained in the choice Büsser made when he walked away from a career that grew Harry Winston tenfold and looked exactly like success from the outside, because from the inside it felt like nothing of the sort. That choice is visible in every piece the laboratory has made since. It is, ultimately, what makes them worth looking at. MB&F timepieces are available at select authorized retailers globally, at M.A.D. Galleries in Geneva, Dubai, Taipei and Hong Kong, and at mbandf.com

My eleven-year-old son had been eagerly waiting for the children's books to arrive for review, and the moment they did, he went straight for this one. His personal library is overflowing, and he has strong opinions about its contents, so when he chose Sarayu's Museum Adventure with Amrita Sher-Gil first, I took note. The book targets children aged four to eight, making his choice intriguing, but anyone who knows my son understands he was drawn to the illustrations, not the story. He is deeply fascinated by illustration and artwork, spends hours trying to copy what he sees on the page, and has sketchbooks and drawing supplies in every corner of our home. So when he opened this book and saw the illustrations inside, he was not reading it so much as studying it. And the illustrations in this book absolutely deserve that kind of study. They are warm, expressive, and full of color that does real work on the page rather than simply decorating it. The artwork feels considered and emotionally alive, which is exactly what you want in a picture book about art itself, and my son noticed this immediately, pointing out how the colors in the illustrations seemed to echo the mood of the story at every turn. The story follows young Sarayu, who is asked to create a self-portrait for her class and does not quite know where to begin. Her mother takes her to a museum, not as a casual visitor but as someone with a genuine question to answer, and there she discovers the paintings of Amrita Sher-Gil, one of the greatest artists India has ever produced and the only woman painter to have been declared a national treasure by the Government of India. As Sarayu moves through the galleries and spends time with Sher-Gil's self-portraits and her vivid, emotionally charged scenes of Indian life, something shifts in the way she sees, not just the paintings but herself. Author Anusha Ramanathan writes with a simplicity that is genuinely difficult to achieve, because it requires knowing exactly what to say and exactly what to leave for the illustration to carry, and in this book she always seems to know which is which. In a few pages she introduces Amrita Sher-Gil to a young reader, opens up a conversation about what art actually means, and tells a complete and deeply satisfying story about a little girl finding her own creative confidence, doing all of this without once making it feel rushed, crowded or effortful. Accomplishing so much in a picture book feels natural and unhurried, which is the finest compliment to the writing. What a child learns from this book works on more than one level. They learn about Amrita Sher-Gil and her significance in Indian art history. They learn that looking at a painting is an active experience, that there is an emotion in a brushstroke, a story in a pose, and meaning in every choice of color. And they learn that making art is not about getting it perfect the first time but about being curious enough to look and willing enough to try. My son, who is well past the four to eight age range this book is written for, sat with it for a long time, going back and forth between the text and the illustrations with the quiet focus he reserves for things that genuinely interest him. That, more than anything I could write here, tells you what this book is worth. Title: Sarayu's Museum Adventure with Amrita Sher-Gil Author: Anusha Ramanathan Published by: Niyogi Books (www.niyogibooksindia.com). Available on Amazon and Flipkart.

At a certain point, Goa stops being about the places you go and starts being about the place you stay. This realization arrives differently for different people, sometimes after one too many afternoons at a beach club that felt identical to the one before it, sometimes simply because the kind of trip you want has quietly changed without your noticing. Either way, the destination remains. What shifts is everything you thought you needed from it. Seré Resort Goa in Vagator understands this shift with the kind of clarity that only comes from having thought carefully about who is actually travelling now and what they are genuinely looking for. The property comprises eight fully serviced private pool villas spread across one acre, available in three- and four-bedroom configurations and accommodating up to 52 guests. While these numbers may not convey the actual experience of being there, they are important when planning a gathering for people who deserve more than a standard resort can offer. And it is gatherings that Seré does particularly well. Not in the event-management sense, not in the way that larger hotels speak about weddings and retreats with a kind of corporate fluency that drains the occasion of anything personal, but in the simpler and more valuable sense of giving a group of people a space that belongs entirely to them. The kind of space where a destination wedding feels like your wedding rather than the hotel's, where a milestone birthday has room to be what it actually is, where a group of friends who have been trying to find the same three days for the better part of a year can finally stop negotiating and simply be somewhere together. Each villa operates as its own contained world. Private plunge pool, dedicated butler, in-villa dining that moves from a floating breakfast in the morning to whatever the evening requires. The on-site Elements Restaurant and Elixir Bar are there when you want them, which is a different thing from being obligated to them. The spa treatments come to you. The culinary experiences are built around intimacy. The butler is present in the way that good service always is, which is to say you notice the results far more than you notice the person producing them. What Seré has understood, and what gives the property its particular quality, is that the most considered form of hospitality is the one that removes the need for decisions rather than multiplying them. The guest who arrives here does not need to construct an itinerary or negotiate a program. The day unfolds effortlessly, offering enough within these grounds and your company to answer the question of what to do next. Goa is changing, or rather, the most interesting version of it is clarifying. The traveler who seeks to inhabit Goa on their own terms, rather than merely consuming it, is the traveler Seré is built for. Website: sereresortgoa.com