The Saree Goes Global: How India’s Six Yards Became a Fashion Statement Without Losing Its Soul For generations, the saree did something rather remarkable. It travelled everywhere without actually needing a passport. It went with Indian families to London, New York, Dubai, Toronto, Singapore and Sydney. It appeared at weddings, festivals, community gatherings and religious celebrations. Mothers taught daughters how to drape it. Grandmothers preserved old silk sarees carefully enough to make them family archives. Now the rest of the fashion world appears to have discovered what Indian women have known for centuries: a long piece of unstitched fabric can be remarkably sophisticated. The saree is increasingly visible on international red carpets, in fashion conversations and in contemporary designer collections. ELLE India recently highlighted this shift through appearances by Deepika Padukone, Alia Bhatt, Zendaya and Naomi Campbell, alongside the rise of pre-draped and experimental saree styles. But calling this simply a “fashion trend” misses the more interesting story. The saree is becoming a case study in how traditional Indian design can enter global fashion without necessarily becoming Westernised first. This isn’t the saree’s first international journey The current attention can sometimes create the impression that the saree has suddenly arrived

Tarang Shakti 2026: Why India’s Multinational Air Exercise Is About More Than Aircraft When fighter aircraft from different countries share the sky, the spectacle is easy to understand. The harder work happens before take-off: agreeing on procedures, coordinating communications, planning missions and ensuring that different forces can operate safely and effectively together. That is the larger purpose of Tarang Shakti 2026, the Indian Air Force’s multinational air exercise beginning on September 26 at Air Force Station Jodhpur in Rajasthan. Scheduled to continue until October 12, the second edition brings foreign air forces to India for complex air operations and joint training. The exercise also includes participation by observer nations. Akashvani’s announcement says eight foreign countries will participate with air assets, while 32 nations will attend as observers. For India, the exercise is an opportunity to practise operating alongside international partners, test coordination in a demanding environment and demonstrate the capabilities of its air force. For participating countries, it offers a chance to learn how other forces plan, communicate and execute missions. The significance lies not simply in how many aircraft arrive, but in what their crews and support teams can learn from working together. Who is participating? The official announcement

BrahMos Goes Regional: How India’s Missile Is Becoming a Defence-Export Brand in Southeast Asia The Philippines already has BrahMos. Vietnam has signed a supply deal and Indonesia has agreed to acquire two batteries. The bigger story is India’s attempt to turn a joint Indo-Russian missile programme into a globally recognised Indian defence-export brand. For most of India’s modern economic history, the country’s global export identity has been associated with software engineers, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, textiles and professional services. Missiles were a different category. That is beginning to change. India’s BrahMos supersonic cruise missile is emerging as one of the clearest examples of the country’s attempt to export sophisticated military technology rather than simply manufacture defence equipment for its own armed forces. The Philippines was the breakthrough customer. Vietnam has now signed a deal. Indonesia has agreed to acquire two BrahMos batteries. And India’s Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh said in October that BrahMos exports are expected to cross $600 million, with the system becoming a benchmark for India’s emerging defence-export story. (rediff.com) The significance goes well beyond the value of the contracts. India is attempting to demonstrate that a weapon originally developed for Indian requirements can become an international product. The

From TAPAS to the Stratosphere: India’s Next Frontier in Long-Endurance Flight DRDO’s experimental high-altitude airship reached 21 kilometres during an October 2026 trial, marking progress towards persistent surveillance and communications from the stratosphere. The achievement complements—but does not resolve—the challenges exposed by the TAPAS-BH-201 drone programme. Together, the projects show why India’s next aerospace breakthroughs […]

BharatGen: How India Is Building AI That Speaks to Its Diaspora India’s BharatGen is moving beyond the idea of a single home-grown chatbot. With multilingual foundation models, speech, document intelligence and India-specific datasets, the government-supported initiative is attempting to build an AI layer that understands the country’s languages and social context — with potential implications far beyond India’s borders. Artificial intelligence is becoming global. The data, however, is not equally global. Many of the world’s most powerful AI systems were developed primarily around languages, datasets and cultural contexts in which English dominates. That does not make them incapable of serving Indian users, but it can leave important gaps when the task involves India’s many languages, scripts, administrative documents, cultural references and local knowledge systems. That is the problem BharatGen is attempting to address. Led by IIT Bombay through the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS), with support from India’s Department of Science and Technology and the IndiaAI Mission, BharatGen has developed a family of sovereign, multilingual and multimodal AI models. The initiative was launched in June 2025 and is now part of India’s wider push to develop domestic foundational AI capabilities. For Indians living overseas, however, BharatGen is more

Pawan Kumar Chandana: The Indian Space Entrepreneur Taking Private Rockets Global After spending years inside ISRO, Pawan Kumar Chandana helped build Skyroot Aerospace into a private launch company capable of reaching orbit. Vikram-1’s July 2026 success has now turned that ambition into a commercial proposition — and TIME’s recognition of Chandana puts a new face on India’s rapidly expanding space economy. For decades, India’s space story was overwhelmingly associated with one institution: ISRO. That story is changing. On July 18, 2026, a rocket developed by Hyderabad-based Skyroot Aerospace lifted off from Sriharikota and successfully reached Low Earth Orbit. It was not simply another Indian launch. It was the first time a private Indian company successfully conducted an orbital launch from Indian soil. Behind that achievement is Pawan Kumar Chandana, Skyroot’s co-founder and CEO, a former ISRO scientist who moved from designing space systems inside India’s national space programme to building a private company capable of selling launch services to customers around the world. His inclusion in TIME100 Next 2026, a list recognising emerging leaders shaping the future, gives the achievement a wider international context. TIME describes TIME100 Next as a platform for people shaping the future and defining the next

Jodhpur RIFF 2026: When Rajasthan’s Folk Traditions Meet the World Under a Desert Moon From dawn music at Jaswant Thada to late-night performances within the historic Mehrangarh Fort complex, Jodhpur RIFF returns from October 22 to 26 with Rajasthani folk traditions, Indian classical music and international collaborations. As the festival marks its 20th year, its […]

Karishma Swali: How Indian Craft Is Finding a New Language Through Contemporary Art Karishma Swali’s work sits at an increasingly important intersection in Indian culture: traditional embroidery, contemporary art, fashion and the economic agency of women artisans. Through the Chanakya School of Craft and her own artistic practice, she is part of a movement asking […]

As India marks the centenary of Satish Gujral’s birth, exhibitions and conversations in Mumbai are bringing renewed attention to an artist who treated painting, sculpture, murals, architecture and design not as separate careers, but as different languages of the same creative mind. Some artists spend a lifetime perfecting one language. Satish Gujral spent his life […]

When “South Indian art” means more than geography There is a danger in calling something a “South Indian art movement” too quickly. India’s contemporary art scene is too diverse for a single regional label to explain it. Kerala is not Tamil Nadu; Hyderabad is not Bengaluru; Chennai is not Kochi. Artists move between cities, institutions […]

India’s Military Strength in 2026: Beyond the Numbers How powerful is India’s military? It sounds like a question with a simple answer: count the soldiers, tanks, aircraft, ships and submarines. But modern military power is rather less cooperative than a spreadsheet. A country can have thousands of tanks and still face problems with maintenance. It can possess hundreds of aircraft but have fewer available for immediate operations. It can have a large navy but still need greater numbers of tankers, submarines and long-range surveillance systems. So when we look at India’s military strength in 2026, the interesting story is not simply how many weapons India possesses. It is how those numbers combine with geography, technology, manpower, industrial capacity and strategic deterrence. Open-source assessments currently place India among the world’s major military powers. GlobalMilitary’s 2026 assessment ranks India fourth globally and lists about 1.48 million active troops, approximately 1.16 million reserves, 2,256 military aircraft and 353 naval vessels. MilitaryCompare also places India fourth in its 2026 ranking, although its underlying figures differ somewhat. The differences are a useful reminder: military statistics are estimates, not cricket scores. A massive manpower base India’s greatest conventional military asset remains manpower. The latest open-source estimates

India’s defence-export story is entering a more interesting phase. The latest signal is not another overseas order for an Indian-made weapon. It is a decision to manufacture Indian-designed autonomous drone technology on European soil. Bengaluru-based Flying Wedge Defence & Aerospace (FWDA) has signed an industrial partnership with Portugal’s Keydef, the defence and aerospace division of Portuguese technology company SketchPixel LDA, under which Keydef will invest an initial €6 million in FWDA’s technologies and the companies will establish production capabilities in Portugal for international markets. The agreement covers FWDA’s Kaal Bhairava autonomous UAV and YAMA interceptor drone, with the proposed Portuguese operation eventually intended to extend across the company’s wider portfolio of surveillance, air-defence and civilian systems. For India, that makes this more than a manufacturing announcement. It is an experiment in whether an Indian defence startup can move from exporting products to becoming part of an international defence-technology supply chain. From Bengaluru engineering to European manufacturing FWDA describes itself as a Bengaluru-based developer of autonomous aerial and AI-enabled defence systems. Its product portfolio includes the Kaalbhairav series and YAMA, alongside other UAV and civilian applications. The company’s own product information describes the Kaalbhairav Lite as an indigenous long-endurance UAV with