With the passing away of Sitaram Yechury, India has lost a conscientious politician and revolutionary. He belonged to the first crop of free India’s bright youngsters who carried the dream of a better India, a socialist India which would serve the interests of the many and not just the few.
The Indian rupee’s stability, despite external pressures from weak Asian currencies and rising US bond yields, highlights a nuanced approach by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in managing the currency.
India’s decision to expand its healthcare programme, providing free medical insurance coverage to citizens aged 70 and above, is a landmark move that demonstrates the government’s continuing commitment to social welfare.
On 9 August 2024, just days before India’s 78th Independence Day, the brutal rape and murder of a 31-year-old trainee doctor at a state-run hospital in one of the country’s oldest cities sparked widespread fury, underscoring the persistent and pervasive violence against women that continues to plague the country.
India is a very unique country. Even though the country is divided into multiple states, each with its own language, food, attire and local culture, and run by autonomous governments, it has not only survived peacefully but flourished over the past 76 years as the largest democracy in the world.
I always have a shelf of books to read and a pile of records to listen, and often feel guilty to see the collections grow. So, a quarantine (fortunately most authorities don’t seem to know that the word means fourteen days) of five or seven days is hardly a bother. I am glad to have the chance to reduce my stack of unread books and unheard songs.
We ask ourselves: can we depend on America to protect liberal democracy and freedom as it did with Kuwait in 1991? The question is loaded, and the answer is nuanced. But it is germane, nonetheless. Whilst Americans and those sympathetic to it will say it is not the world's policeman, it was roundly criticised when it tried to be in Kuwait, Bosnia, and Somalia. But history has shown us the world is better off with a strong and engaged America than an uncertain and hesitant America
In a predominantly residential university, it was imperative for the authorities to ensure accommodation by reopening the hostels. Reports suggest that the students have become restive as they clamour for hostel facilities. For all the emphasis on the fine/performing arts, a backlash by the students was only to be anticipated. And so it came to be. In the wake of the gherao of senior functionaries, administration within the campus has come to a virtual halt.
It is entirely in Beijing’s interest that the US-led West, which had disentangled itself from West Asia and the Afghanistan-Pakistan theatre to focus its strategic energies on the Indo-Pacific to counter the threat of a rampant China, be waylaid in Europe. That is a huge relief for Beijing which was getting cornered in the Asia-Pacific.
There was no apparent contradiction between the scientific truth and non-scientific faith, and hence no need to isolate one from the other. Until modern science dawned with Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and the others in the Middle Ages, no clear discrimination was preferred between philosophy and science. The fact that the social sciences could not take a clear shape and suffered an identity crisis was also responsible for the non-division
