Opinion

Kamal Baruah Over the centuries, people have learnt to live with rivers. Once upon a time, Huang-he was China’s sorrow. The river killed millions of people since 2nd Century BC from catastrophic floods. In 1955, China successfully controlled the Huang-he by building overflow channels and...

Richard K. Sherwin Recent challenges to democratic institutions and processes in the United States have raised fundamental political and legal questions to which all liberal democracies must have convincing answers. When should military leaders refuse to follow presidential orders that they believe are unconstitutional? At...

Melvin Durai Carl Reiner, a great American comedian, recently passed away at the age of 98. What struck me the most, while reflecting on his life, was how active and productive he continued to be even in his 90s. He created a Twitter account in...

Saeed Naqvi A clue to the future of Sino-Indian relations lies in the different ways the two ancient civilizations came out of their respective cocoons into the modern world in 1947 and 1948. Indifference to the debates in British Parliament preceding the Indian Independence Act...

Ajit Ranade Forty years ago, India and China had roughly the same economic size, measured as GDP in dollars. Today, China is five times bigger. This growth has been mainly due to China’s single-minded focus on exporting its products to the West. China opened the...

Bhubanananda Sahu The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had taken a landmark step in the history of human discovery to approve a gene therapy drug called Luxturna for the first time, to be directly administered in patients to cure a genetic disease for lifetime....

Nikunja Bihari Sahu The decision of the Union Cabinet to open up the country’s Space sector for private participation has come as a welcome response from many quarters including the highly respected ISRO. ISRO chairman K Sivan has said the step would not only result...

Shivaji Sarkar It is a global world. One button switches off, another opens. As India gets into a stand-off with China, there are other players who stand to gain. Russia is emerging as a supplier of critical arms and aircraft to many players, including India...

Hauke Engel and Mekala Krishnan COVID-19 has shown how a long-recognised but underappreciated global risk can suddenly materialise and wreak social and economic devastation in a matter of weeks. The implication is clear: While the world is focused on battling the pandemic, firms and governments...

Dhanada K Mishra In a very well known social science experiment, a sample of randomly selected people is asked whether they understand how a bicycle worked. As would be expected, an overwhelming majority would say they do! Yet on asking to draw a rough sketch...