I/L 03
Sun on the Water
Across the plains, farmers are swapping diesel pumps for solar panels. The economics, and the aquifers, are changing fast.
Issue fourteen
A new story every Saturday
The River Remembers
The Indus has wandered across its plains for millennia, abandoning towns and feeding new ones. We followed its old beds from the mountains to the sea to ask what a river remembers.
Indus/Lens
Stories of innovation, shaped by the river.
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Discover unexplored stories
Issue thirteen
Brick by Brick
Long before modern planners drew their first grid, a city on the Indus laid straight streets and covered drains. What can a 4,500-year-old city teach the ones we are building today?
Issue twelve
Salt Range
Deep inside a mountain of pink salt, generations of miners have carved tunnels, mosques and a living. A portrait of work underground.
Issue eleven
Monsoon Ledger
In the villages of lower Sindh, farmers keep careful notebooks of every rain. Their records are becoming a climate archive no satellite can replace.
More from the archive
Issue ten
The Last Boatmen
For centuries a community of fisherfolk lived on wooden boats on a great freshwater lake. As the water changes, so does the only life they have known.
Issue nine
Silk & Scree
Along a highway cut into the world’s youngest mountains, traders, truckers and teahouse owners keep an ancient route alive.
Issue eight
Ajrak
Indigo, madder and a carved wooden block. Inside the workshops where a textile becomes a signature of identity.
Issue seven
Kitchen Atlas
A map of a city drawn in breakfast stalls, late-night grills and the families who have run them for four generations.
Issue six
Mother Tongues
In the high valleys, a language spoken by a few hundred thousand people has no relatives anywhere on earth. Meet those writing it down.
Issue five
Platform Number One
Railway stations built for an empire now carry the hopes of a hundred million passengers. A journey through their brick and iron.
Issue four
Code Bazaar
From small-town bedrooms, a generation of freelancers is quietly selling software to the world. Who are they, and what do they want?
Issue three
Glass Houses
Above the villages, glaciers are melting into lakes held back by ice and gravel. Communities are learning to live beneath them.
Issue two
After Midnight
At the shrines, music begins when the city falls asleep. A night with the singers who carry centuries of poetry in their voices.
Issue one
First Light
Why a magazine about a river? Our founding essay on the civilisation, the people and the ideas that grew along the Indus.