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My initial column writing for many years was for newspapers in Pakistan. I have visited it many times, have spoken at its universities and its literature festivals often and know the place intimately also through study over the last three decades. What is striking to...

There are plenty of babus who have switched to politics and have enjoyed a good run. But not all babus who had a meteoric rise to political stardom can maintain that streak. The case of Janata Dal (U)’s RCP Singh seems to be headed that...

The world order is at risk of a lasting split, with the United States and its allies on one side, and China and its partners on the other. As US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen noted at an Atlantic Council event last month, this outcome is...

Food shortages are beginning to cast a shadow over the world. One long-term factor is the warming of our planet, which has slowly destroyed agricultural land. But the proximate cause of greatest concern is the war in Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Black Sea...

It is not often that a novel winning a coveted international prize becomes a binding force seeking to bridge gaps between communities, nations, religions, genders and even languages. When it does, it sends into raptures lovers of literature as much as political-religious-linguistic activists who are...

The cat is out of the bag, again. The impregnable Chinese Wall of one-sided propaganda suppressing alleged persecution, domination and torture of Uyghur Moslems in Xinjiang province appears to have been breached. The purported secret documents – known as Xinjiang Police Files - recording ruthless...

Yet another shooting snuffed out the lives of 19 children and two teachers in an elementary school classroom in Uvalde, Texas in the span of just 10 days after a similar shooting had killed 10 people in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York 14 May....

Last month, a set of over 100 retired government servants wrote a letter to the prime minister. The signatories included a former head of the Research and Analysis Wing or RAW, and a former National Security Advisor. They wrote that communal violence in India “is...

Inter-service tensions have always existed in babudom but remain low-key. The oldest fault line is the perception that the government favours the IAS more than the other all-India services, especially in terms of powers and promotions etc. In recent months though, there was a growing...

We all tend to follow habits at work and in other aspects of our lives. I generally work best in the morning and hate working after dinner. Our habits usually reflect preferences, learning, or a combination of the two – or, as Charles Duhigg notes...