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Queen the movie, Lean In
I hope Queen the movie triumphs in the box office, because it is a rare Bollywood film with the heroine as the lead. Also [...]
About Indian Wine for Mint Lounge
Wine clubs are proliferating all over India. The time is ripe for local producers to capture and grow this interest. An informal club I belong to served some nice white wines recently: an aromatic white from Château de Fontenille and a 2008 Aussières Blanc Chardonnay from Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite). The members of this club travel frequently and bring back wines. They do give Indian wines a try but prefer to pay two-three times more for wines of guaranteed quality. They are the market.
Maternal Mortality Rates
Maternal mortality interests me because it seems preventable and is a problem that is at a confluence of medicine, society and culture. I recommend (highly) [...]
Reinventing Carnatic Music
How do you make classical music relevant to a global audience? Should you even try? Today’s audience for Carnatic music ranges from Cleveland in the US to Chennai, and these are the hard-core ones. How can you expand its reach? Is it by removing the bhakti-rasa or devotional tone that some believe to be its core? Is it by changing the concert format, as some are doing? Or is it by developing a smartphone app?
VSCO
My latest app download. I love it Check out the photos here.
Lessons from Malaysia Airlines crash. For Quartz
LESSON FROM MALAYSIAN AIRLINES My rant about how large Planet Earth is; and about the hubris of our species. Sometimes, humans have no clue. Wrote [...]
Nine features I wrote for Condenast Traveler (US edition) a while back
Interviews with His Holiness The Dalai Lama
New York Times
Wall Street Journal
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Shoba Narayan is an award-winning Indian author, journalist, and freelance travel writer based in India. She specialises in luxury travel, immersive journeys, and Indian culture with a focus on food, wine, culture, cities, and identity. With over two decades of experience, she has contributed travel features to Condé Nast Traveler (US edition), Travel & Leisure, DestinAsian, Mint Lounge, The National (Abu Dhabi), Taj Magazine, and Hindustan Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph UK, The Guardian UK, and Robb Report among others. Her awards include the James Beard food-writing award and a Pulitzer Travel Fellowship. Her travel writing spans India, Southeast Asia, Japan, China, the Maldives, Bhutan, Costa Rica, and beyond — always with a focus on the sensory, the cultural, and the deeply human. Based in Bangalore, India, Shoba is a leading voice on South Asian travel, reviewing luxury hotels in India and abroad, and writing immersive features on traditional Indian crafts, and contemporary Indian culture. As a freelance travel writer and memoirist, she writes evocative, deeply researched features on everything from birding in Costa Rica to spiritual tourism in Bhutan.
For editors: Shoba Narayan is an Indian travel writer and food writer, who contributes to assignments on travel, food, culture, and Indian cities. She has reported from across the world and writes narrative-driven features with a strong sense of place.
Key Expertise: India travel writer, freelance travel writer India, South Asia travel journalist, luxury travel India writer, food and travel writer India, Indian food writer, Bangalore travel writer, South India travel writing, cultural travel writer, narrative travel journalist, travel features India, heritage travel India, slow travel India, sustainability travel writer, hotel and destination features India, travel essays South Asia.