mythily ramachandran

How author Kathryn Aalto recreated the magic of Winnie-the-Pooh’s forest, an actual place that inspired A.A. Milne
Who wouldn’t have loved to stroll through the Hundred Acre Wood, where the world’s most beloved bear Winnie-the-Pooh ambled with his friends, away from frowning adults, doling out valuable life lessons for his readers young and old? Much to our envy, American writer and landscape designer Kathryn Aalto did that, in a way. And much to our delight, she wrote a book about it — “The ...

Maggie Doyne started by sponsoring a child’s education and today runs a school and home for orphans
“In the blink of an eye we can all make a difference,” says CNN’s 2015 Hero of the Year Maggie Doyne, the founder of BlinkNow Foundation, a not-for-profit trust based in Nepal that nurtures orphaned and less privileged children with love and education.
Doyne was selected as the CNN Hero of the Year after an online vote by the channel’s audience. At the ceremony held in New York City on December...

Mann Deshi Mahila Bank has helped nurture the entrepreneurs and samaritans that conventional institutions wrote off as housewives
Vanita Pise (40) came to Mhaswad, (a village in Satara district of Maharashtra) as an 18-year-old bride. Her husband managed a small cloth store and to add to the family income, he also reared poultry.
In 1997, when the poultry business suffered a loss of Rs55,000 (Dh3,297), Vanita stepped out of her house to work in fields as a daily labourer.
After the day’s expe...

My first meeting with John Foppe will forever remain vivid. A motivational speaker from Illinois, Foppe was in Chennai recently, when I met him for an interview. During the course of our conversation, Foppe asked for a glass of water. It was served in a wine goblet and I contemplated: “Should I help John with it or do I leave it to him?”
In the blink of an eye, John had picked up the goblet using his foot, and holding it between his toes, raised it to his mouth to sip. Then I realised how muc...

Todd Bol’s idea of setting up a little library outside his home — promoting a sense of community —has now been adopted by thousands in 75 countries
Painted in bright azure hues, what could have easily have passed off as a birdhouse in someone’s front yard stopped me in my tracks. I was on my walk in the university town of Athens (Georgia, the United States).
What made me take a closer look were three yellow-lettered words, “Read–Free-Share”, on its front. A small door was waiting to be opened...

When I am overcome with weakness, I bandage my heart with a woman’s patience in adversity. I bandage it with the upright posture of a Syrian woman who is not bent by bereavement, poverty, or displacement as she rises from the banquets of death and carries on shepherding life’s rituals.
I bandage my heart with the determination of that boy they hit with an electric stick on his only kidney until he urinated blood. Yet he returned and walked in the next demonstration.
I bandage it with the stea...

The Sri Lankan army thought no one was watching as it shelled unarmed civilians. Then the filmmaker sprang a rather unpleasant surprise
Callum Macrae’s documentary “No Fire Zone” is not a story, rather several stories strung together, of people like you and me, of families and children like yours and mine, who were rendered homeless during a 26-year-long civilian war. And what you see on screen are real, gory, bloody scenes.
Macrae’s earlier film, “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields”, broadcast in Ju...

Daniel Kish hasn’t let blindless come in the way of living life to the fullest
Waiting outside the hotel room for Daniel Kish to answer the door bell, I wondered, “Will Daniel open the door himself?”
It did not take more than half a minute before the door opened and I found myself staring at Kish.
Walking into the room, I realised that Kish was alone. And I watch in amazement as he moved around confidently. That is when I remind myself that Kish’s limits know no bounds.
For this Californian h...

Padma Venkataraman looks back on a life spent bringing those afflicted by leprosy back into the mainstream of Indian society
She embraces them warmly, listening to their chatter while chiding some of them for not putting in their best.
Like excited students they gather around her as they wait for the auction of their paintings to be held that evening. These students of Bindu Art School defy stereotypes, for they have been cured of leprosy and now let their imagination run riot while their def...

That was one Monday Felicity Aston looked forward to — a day she is unlikely to ever forget.
She dreamt of red wine and a hot shower as she waited for her plane to pick her up that January morning, at Hercules Inlet, (located geographically at 80 degrees south on the Ronne Ice Shelf) in the Antarctic. She would have fulfilled her dream the day before, had not the weather played spoilsport, preventing her aircraft from landing.
That morning she tweeted, "Woken to the wonderful realisation that...

Miriam Chandy Menacherry's film shines a light on Mumbai's little-known rat killers
Miriam Chandy Menacherry seeks little-known stories that miss the reader's eye. This quest has taken her to Al Shahaniya in Qatar, where Bedouin tribesmen gear up camels for races; to the forests of Jharkhand notorious for naxalite ambushes; and through the streets of Mumbai while accompanying rat killers on their nocturnal mission.
Her desert venture resulted in the production of a documentary film on...

In India's Tamil Nadu, a collaboration between an NGO and a home for abandoned children has helped bring lasting change to a community
Alistair was born with severe cleft lip and palate. When he was only a few weeks old his parents left him at Mercy Home. Alistair grew up there with several other children, all abandoned by their parents — some on account of their gender, others for being born with a handicap.
Thanks to kind donors, Alistair's cleft lip and palate were surgically corrected. An...

A Top Ten CNN Hero, Pushpa Basnet cares for children who find themselves in prison for no fault of theirs
When Laxmi, 39, was arrested for the death of her husband, she had no option but to take her eight-month-old daughter Aarti with her to prison.
Her married life, in a remote village of Nepal, was not a bed of roses, but of bruises and pain, inflicted upon her by her husband, an alcoholic. One day, unable to endure this suffering any longer, Laxmi hit him back with a metal blowpipe. Little...

For most of us a bar of soap is merely a part of our daily ritual, something that we pick up casually at a store every month, or choose diligently for its fragrance and brand. At the end of a good wash, the squeaky clean feeling that it leaves behind eggs us ahead with a renewed energy to deal with life’s challenges. Just imagine a day when you have to do without a soap bar. I can almost hear the “eeks” out there.
Soap, though, is a luxury for several people in parts of Africa and Asia. Emily...

Ernest Hemingway said: "It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle."
Kate Harris and Melissa Yule will no doubt endorse that, having pedalled through ten countries across 10,000 kilometres in ten months....