Bread can — and does — sustain us, even under the most economically stretched conditions — It’s 2:15 a.m. and I am humming the tune of “Ederlezi,” approaching the Suada and Olga Bridge toward the Grbavica district of Sarajevo, Bosnia, where I have rented a room. Grbavica had suffered heavy shelling in the 1990s when Sarajevo was under siege by nationalist Serbs. Window sills bloom with…

How makeup empowers India’s younger generation — I bought my first lipstick when I turned 30. Blood red, it brightened my face. That same year, a Bollywood movie, “Lipstick Under My Burkha,” narrated the lives of four women in a mid-size Indian town for whom wearing lipstick was a metaphor for how they sought a spoonful of…

On the afternoon of December 26 in 2017, on Hans Bhugra Road in India’s metropolis of Mumbai, four women were arrested as they tried to prevent their homes from being demolished by the city’s municipal body. One of them was Chhaya Thakur. Her elder daughter was in the office at…