Tag: Travel

National

Severe Delhi Smog: Singapore High Commission Issues Advisory to Nationals as AQI Crosses 400

Tanisha Cardozo

Written by Tanisha Cardozo || Team Allycaral National Desk

As Delhi’s air quality continued to remain in the ‘severe’ category on Monday, the Singapore High Commission in India issued an advisory for its nationals residing in the Delhi-NCR region, urging them to follow official health guidelines and remain cautious amid worsening pollution levels. According to the Central Pollution Control Board’s Sameer app, the overall Air Quality Index in the capital stood at 437 at 2 pm, with all monitoring stations recording readings of 400 or above.

The advisory was shared by the Singapore High Commission in New Delhi through its official X handle, noting that on December 13, 2025, the Indian authorities invoked Stage 4 of the Graded Response Action Plan, the highest level of pollution control measures in the Delhi National Capital Region. Under GRAP Stage 4, construction and industrial activities are heavily restricted, while schools and offices are encouraged to shift to a hybrid mode of functioning.

The High Commission highlighted that the Delhi government has advised residents, particularly children and individuals with respiratory or cardiac ailments, to stay indoors and to wear masks when stepping outside. In light of this, the High Commission urged Singapore nationals in the region to pay heed to the advisory and prioritise their health and safety.

The advisory also cautioned travellers about possible disruptions to flight operations due to low visibility caused by thick smog. The Indira Gandhi International Airport and several airlines have issued advisories regarding delays, cancellations and diversions, prompting the High Commission to ask travellers to stay in touch with their respective airlines for real-time updates. A contact point was also provided for Singapore nationals requiring consular assistance.

The severe air quality and dense smog have engulfed the national capital for the third consecutive day, significantly impacting daily life and air travel. The CPCB categorises air quality as ‘moderate’ between AQI levels of 101 and 200, ‘poor’ between 201 and 300, ‘very poor’ between 301 and 400, and ‘severe’ for readings above 400. AQI levels of 450 and above fall under ‘severe plus’, while a reading of 500 is considered seriously dangerous.

According to airport authorities, over 400 flights at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport were delayed, with 61 cancellations and five diversions reported. In an operational update issued at 2 pm, the Delhi airport said that runway visibility had improved and flight operations were gradually returning to normal. However, it cautioned that some arrivals and departures could still be affected and advised passengers to remain in contact with their airlines for the latest information.

Events in Goa

DAG Unveils Landmark Exhibition on Indian Company Paintings at Aguad Port & Jail Complex, Goa

Tanisha Cardozo

Written by Tanisha Cardozo || Team Allycaral

DAG, in collaboration with the Department of Tourism, Government of Goa, has opened A Treasury of Life: Indian Company Paintings, c. 1790 to 1835, the most comprehensive exhibition of its kind in India, at the Aguad Port & Jail Complex. Featuring over 200 works drawn entirely from the DAG collection, the exhibition is curated by Giles Tillotson, Senior Vice President at DAG, and remains on view from 2 December 2025 to 14 January 2026, following a private preview held on 1 December.

Dedicated to honouring the largely anonymous Indian artists commissioned by the East India Company in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the exhibition explores how these painters responded creatively to new forms of patronage. Moving beyond traditional courtly conventions, they developed entirely new visual languages that blended Indian artistic practices with Western influences, marking a crucial transition in the evolution of Indian art.

Long marginalised within art historical narratives, Company painting has often been viewed as falling between classical tradition and modernism. A Treasury of Life challenges this perception by positioning the genre as a vital precursor to Indian modernism. The exhibition presents works across three broad themes: natural history, architecture, and Indian manners and customs. Together, these paintings document India’s flora and fauna with scientific precision, record architectural landmarks and cityscapes through hybrid visual techniques, and vividly portray traders, artisans, religious figures, and sacred idols.

Beyond their aesthetic value, these works serve as historical records of worlds that have since undergone profound transformation. From depictions of now-endangered plant species and altered ecosystems to careful renderings of architectural heritage and social customs, the paintings offer rare visual insights into India’s past. They also reflect European patrons’ desire to document an unfamiliar land and the ingenuity with which Indian artists adapted their skills to meet new expectations and audiences.

The exhibition includes works by known Company artists such as Sita Ram, Sewak Ram, and Chuni Lal, alongside contextual works by European artists including James Forbes, F. B. Solvyns, and Charles Gold. These references illuminate the broader visual culture of the period, demonstrating how Indian painters engaged with foreign models to create something entirely new rather than merely imitating Western styles.

Speaking on the occasion, Hon’ble Minister for Tourism, Shri Rohan A. Khaunte, said the exhibition brings to Goa an extraordinary era of Indian artistic brilliance and reinforces the state’s growing role as a centre for heritage-driven cultural experiences. Ashish Anand, CEO and Managing Director of DAG, noted that the exhibition builds on the gallery’s longstanding commitment to presenting pre-modern and hybrid art practices that laid the groundwork for Indian modernism.

Director of the Department of Tourism, Shri Kedar Naik, highlighted the exhibition’s contribution to Goa’s cultural calendar and its role in promoting meaningful tourism rooted in learning and heritage. Managing Director of GTDC, Shri Kuldeep Arolkar, and Vice President of Operations and Business Development at Aguad Port and Jail Complex, Shri Savio Mathias, also emphasised the importance of hosting high-calibre cultural initiatives that bring together art, history, and public engagement.

Accompanied by a publication featuring an introductory essay by curator Giles Tillotson and scholarly contributions from Apurba Chatterjee, Nicolas Roth, Malini Roy, Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, and Jennifer Howes, A Treasury of Life repositions Company painting as an essential chapter in India’s artistic journey. The exhibition invites audiences to reconsider the beginnings of modern Indian art through the lens of a genre that captured a moment of profound transition and creative exchange.

Events in Goa

Serendipity Arts Festival 2025 Day 2 Unfolds with Jazz Grooves, Motown Memories and Immersive Visual Worlds

Tanisha Cardozo

Written by Tanisha Cardozo || Team Allycaral

The second day of Serendipity Arts Festival 2025 unfolded as a vibrant celebration of sound, memory and visual storytelling, reaffirming the festival’s commitment to diverse artistic expressions spread across multiple venues in Panjim. Audiences moved seamlessly between music, film, exhibitions and culinary experiences, encountering art that invited both participation and reflection.

At The Arena at Nagalli Hills, the evening’s musical journey began with The Revisit Project, curated by Zubin Balaporia and Ehsaan Noorani. Known for demystifying the complexities of jazz, the band delivered a powerful blend of groove-driven rhythms, old-school funk and contemporary jazz, weaving pointed observations about life, love and politics in India into their performance. The set offered a refreshing balance of technical precision and emotional accessibility, drawing in both seasoned listeners and new audiences.

The night reached a celebratory high with Motown Madness, also curated by Zubin Balaporia. The high-energy concert paid tribute to the iconic Motown sound that shaped generations, transporting audiences through timeless hits associated with legends like Michael Jackson, The Supremes and Stevie Wonder. The performance blended nostalgia with exuberance, turning the venue into a space of collective joy and shared musical memory.

Reflecting on the evening, Balaporia noted that the curation was about embracing the vast emotional range of music — from the sharp, contemporary language of jazz to the enduring warmth of Motown. Despite their differences, he observed, both performances met on common ground through rhythm, storytelling and shared energy.

Meanwhile, the Captain of Ports Jetty in Old Goa continued to host unique experiences aboard the Barge installation. The Silent Film Screening by Aldona Video Club transformed the floating venue into an intimate cinema, where audiences engaged with cinema that both honoured and questioned traditional narrative forms. The collective’s approach examined representation and media boundaries, offering a contemplative counterpoint to the city’s musical pulse.

From December 14 onwards, exhibitions across festival venues opened to the public, further expanding the festival’s immersive landscape. At the Directorate of Accounts, Multiplay 02: Soft Systems, curated by Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, invited visitors into a participatory environment designed as a sandbox for collective experience. Featuring works by artists including Chunky Move, Jayasimha Chandrashekar, Alke Reeh, Bwanga Kapumpa and Teja Gavankar, the exhibition encouraged acts of care, rest and attention — from modelling clay portraits in the dark to listening to the sounds of trees and birds. The curators described the project as a tender constellation of practices that hold space, invite participation and foster connection through touch, rhythm and generosity.

At Art Park, The Culinary Odyssey of Goa, curated by Odette Mascarenhas, explored Goan cuisine as a living archive of memory and migration. The project showcased five traditional kitchens representing Hindu artisans, Muslim descendants of the Bijapur dynasty, Gaud Saraswat Brahmins, Indo-Luso influences and Christian descendants. Through tastings centred on ingredients such as turmeric, kokum, black peppercorn, tamarind and star anise, visitors engaged with stories of spice, history and everyday ritual narrated by the curator herself.

The Promenade hosted Urban Reimagined, curated by Ravi Agarwal, which examined the city through the lens of waste, extraction and inequality. Featuring photographs by the late Vivan Sundaram, the exhibition positioned waste as a marker of caste and class, prompting audiences to confront what urban spaces reveal — and conceal — about aspiration, excess and social structure.

At The Access Village in the Old GMC Complex, Therefore I Am brought together seven artists whose lived experiences of disability shape their creative practices. Working across painting, sculpture, photography, video, performance and digital media, the artists challenged conventional perceptions of the body, presenting disability as a powerful site of creativity, resistance and truth. Curator Salil Chaturvedi highlighted the exhibition as an essential reminder that disability is not marginal, but an integral part of the collective human story.

Together, the experiences of Day 2 wove a rich tapestry of jazz, nostalgia, visual inquiry and participatory art, underscoring Serendipity Arts Festival 2025’s role as a platform where artistic expression meets social reflection and shared experience.

Events in Goa

Serendipity Arts Festival 2025 Opens in Panjim with a Grand Celebration of Heritage and Innovation

Tanisha Cardozo

Written by Tanisha Cardozo || Team Allycaral

The landmark 10th edition of Serendipity Arts Festival opened in Panjim on December 12 with a powerful celebration of India’s cultural heritage and contemporary artistic expression. Returning to Goa for ten days of immersive experiences, the opening day reflected the festival’s enduring vision of bridging tradition and innovation through art.

The evening commenced with the inauguration of Barge at the Captain of Ports Jetty in Old Goa, where Founder-Patron Mr. Sunil Kant Munjal welcomed audiences to the milestone edition. Reflecting on the journey of the festival, he described Serendipity Arts as a movement that has grown into a shared cultural space connecting artists, communities, and audiences across disciplines. The 10th edition, he noted, is dedicated to Mukta Munjal, whose early initiatives in the arts continue to inspire the festival’s spirit.

Curated by Veerangana Solanki, Barge transformed a floating structure into an experiential space exploring absence and presence through spatial, architectural, and sonic responses. Drawing from earlier exhibitions, the installation invited visitors to activate the space through movement, sound, and perception, leaving behind fleeting yet personal imprints.

The opening continued at Nagalli Hills with Palette(s), a striking performance by Cédric Gagneur and Marc Oosterhoff that reimagined wooden pallets as both object and collaborator. Blurring the lines between dance and circus, the performance explored gravity, vulnerability, and repetition in a raw and physical expression.

The night concluded with Clay Play, curated by Shubha Mudgal and Aneesh Pradhan, a mesmerizing performance that foregrounded percussion instruments crafted from clay. Rooted deeply in Goan traditions, the sounds of the ghumat and other instruments resonated through the space, reaffirming their place as living cultural practices rather than relics of the past.

Across the city, Beasts of Reincarnations: Mythical Beings in the City began appearing along Panjim’s streets and waterfronts. Curated by Diptej Vernekar, the large-scale installations reimagined Goa’s effigy-making traditions, inviting the public to encounter ritual memory through forms suspended between destruction, renewal, and contemporary urban life.

As the festival unfolds, exhibitions opening from December 14 will further expand this dialogue. These include Not a shore, neither a ship, but the sea itself at the Old GMC Complex, OTHERLAND at the Old GMC Building, and several immersive installations exploring systems, food memory, loss, movement, and sensory experience across multiple venues.

Day 1 of Serendipity Arts Festival 2025 set a compelling tone for the days ahead, weaving together local and global voices, traditional and contemporary practices, and transforming Panjim into a living, breathing canvas of artistic discovery.

Events in Goa

At Serendipity Arts Festival, a Goa Barge Transforms Into a Floating Exhibition

Tanisha Cardozo

Written by Tanisha Cardozo || Team Allycaral

At the 10th edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival, one of Goa’s iconic ore barges is set to take on an unexpected new role as a floating exhibition. Titled Barge, the installation will be anchored at the Captain of Ports Jetty in Old Goa from December 12, reimagining a vessel long associated with the state’s riverine economy as a space for artistic exploration. Curated by Mumbai-based writer and curator Veeranganakumari Solanki, the project transforms the familiar industrial structure into a participatory environment that listens as much as it speaks, inviting visitors to engage with ideas of presence, absence and sensory perception.

For decades, barges have been an essential part of Goa’s landscape—silently ferrying iron ore along its waterways and shaping the region’s industrial identity since the liberation era and the rise of mechanised mining. By bringing this utilitarian vessel into the realm of contemporary art, the exhibition bridges the gap between the everyday and the imaginative, framing the barge as a site of possibility rather than mere function. Solanki builds on ideas from three earlier Serendipity Arts Festival projects—Future Landing, Synaesthetic Notations and A Haptic Score—each of which explored the ways the human body interprets sensory information. These inquiries continue aboard the barge, where its cavernous architecture becomes a point of departure for artistic response.

Solanki describes the barge as a space defined by absence. Its hollow structure, she notes, creates a cavity where presence can form—whether through sound, memory or imagination. She reflects on how imagination emerges in the gaps between what we perceive and what remains unseen, and how this threshold becomes fertile ground for potentiality. The artists contributing to the exhibition—Prajakta Potnis, Hemant Sreekumar and Julien Segard—work directly with the vessel’s architecture, responding to the interplay of sound, space and material. Their works explore the fragile boundaries between the industrial and the imaginative, offering viewers a space to dwell in uncertainty rather than seek definitive answers.

A central element of Barge is an evolving sound work by artist Alan Rego, who has been studying the acoustic behaviour of the vessel. Rego collects sounds from within the barge and plans to submerge a microphone into the river during his performance, gathering underwater noise that will be processed in real time. Using a programme that breaks noise into frequencies and reshapes them into evolving patterns, he gradually transforms randomness into rhythm, noise into music. For Solanki, this transformation embodies the exhibition’s core idea that presence can emerge from absence and meaning can arise from what first appears incoherent.

Solanki’s curatorial practice has long explored the ways artistic forms converse across public and private spaces. Her experience as a Brooks International Research Fellow at Tate Modern, a resident at Delfina Foundation and her leadership roles at Space Studio and The Gujral Foundation reflects a deep engagement with art’s relationship to environment and community. She now co-directs the SqW:Lab Foundation and serves on the advisory committee of the Piramal Photography Gallery at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai.

Visitors to Serendipity Arts Festival can experience Barge throughout the event at the Captain of Ports Jetty in Old Goa. The installation stands as an evocative reminder of how imagination can transform the familiar, offering a rare opportunity to step inside a vessel that has shaped Goa’s industrial history and witness it reimagined through the lens of sound, space and sensory inquiry.