Seven Of Our Most Read Stories Of 2025!

Memories, music, and mental health were some of the ideas that struck a chord with you — our readers — this year. Revisit some of your favourite stories.

Do You Remember Your Mother’s Favourite Song?

Nimi Ravindran, a theatre practitioner born and bred in Bengaluru, weaves together a humorous and heartbreaking tapestry of her memories. She skips between remembering herself as “a proud child of the Nehruvian project” (of the public sector undertakings, or PSUs), the science around her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and super-sad songs from Indian cinema. With each leap, Nimi draws serendipitous connections, reminding us that there will always be a blur between private memory and public record.

How To Build A Community-Forward F&B Hub?

City-based F&B entrepreneur Akhila Srinivas gave us the skinny on how to carefully and creatively fit multiple concepts and cuisines into The Courtyard’s 6,000-square-foot area on Kengal Hanumanthaiah Road. She’s driven by one diktat: “You don’t have to build everything all at once.” But she’s also gleaned lessons from pioneering modernist architect BV Doshi’s Aranya, a 1980s low-income housing project in Indore.

Water Babies of Bengaluru, Unite!

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, the Luru Newsletter team travelled over 100 kilometres to gather at the campout point of Makali Durga, a popular trekking spot off Doddaballapura Road. Along with 70-odd people decked out in windcheaters, track pants, and backpacks, we meandered down to the edge of the gloriously glistening Gunjur Lake. The OpenWater Swim Tribe Bengaluru was the doula in our first plunge into a city lake.

Luru Hangs With… Visual Artist Mohit Mahato

Mohit Mahato kicked off Luru Hangs with…, our monthly newsletter series that takes you behind the processes and pleasures of the city’s artists. We spent a day in Mohit’s studio, understanding that he doesn’t simply take inspiration from Bengaluru’s trees and flowers; they are an integral part of his practice. He tucks painted paper scrolls into seedpods and transforms seed-cases into the covers of accordion books, even using them as the “paper” for his drawings.

A Pride Of Place

His pride pricked by a brusque, offhandish comment by a visiting Russian delegation, Kengal Hanumanthaiah set out to build a “shilpa kala kavya” or sculptural epic in stone. This building — the Vidhana Soudha, the grand, granite seat of the Karnataka government — was built in four years and officially opened for business in 1956. Since June 2025, for the first time, citizens have finally been allowed beyond its high fences courtesy of the walking tour launched by the Karnataka State Tourism Development Corporation.

Community Over Computers?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already everywhere, changing the lights at traffic signals, dispatching our emails, personalising ads on our social media platforms, analysing large datasets, setting us up on romantic dates, and driving our cars. However, the swift introduction of large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Anthropic’s Claude, among others, has heralded a transformation in contemporary human experience. This must be acknowledged, and we must wrestle with its effects. We spoke to two experts to understand the role of these ubiquitous technologies in the sphere of mental health care.

Soppu Benefits

René Redzepi, Danish chef and co-owner of the Michelin 3-star restaurant Noma, might have elevated “foraging” into a buzzword in the fine-dining circles. But Chasing Soppu, a handy, downloadable guidebook compiled by Dhruthi Somesh, Rohit Rao, Ranjini Murali, Seema Mundoli, and Harini Nagendra — a faculty team of ecologists, researchers, and an illustrator from Azim Premji University — shows that foraging has been a common practice in Bengaluru for ages. The city’s lakes and parks, the crevices in our pavements, unused and disturbed lands, gutterways, and the remaining patches of urban forests are rich and bursting with a wonderful diversity of soppu, or edible green leafy vegetables.