Opinion

I remember the day PM Modi completed 12 continuous years in office as India’s first elected PM (even surpassing Nehru’s record of 17 years!) a senior politician of the ruling party had visited my house surrounded by his cronies demanding that I give a soundbite...

On 5 September 1906, at Hotel Ples in Duino near Trieste, Ludwig Boltzmann withdrew to his room while his wife, Henriette, and daughter, Elsa, went swimming. When Elsa returned, she was horrified to find that her father had taken his life. No suicide note was...

Anyone old enough to remember the Cold War will also remember an imagined place called the “free world.” It was where Westerners believed they lived, while Eastern Europeans, Russians, and Chinese lived behind barbed wire. The description was partly true, insofar as there was barbed...

Melvin Durai US President Donald Trump recently issued an executive order instructing US federal agencies to refer to Lake Ontario, which sits between America and Canada, as “Lake America.” He did this following a trade dispute with Canada, his way of antagonising Canadians. They should...

Pedro Abramovay & Julia Sakr-Tierney From the moment it was announced, the ceasefire between the United States, Israel, and Iran has been marked by a different form of confrontation: peace on the precipice of war and war on the brink of resolution. The memorandum of...

Sally Wentworth World leaders will gather in New York this month for the 81st United Nations General Assembly under the theme “Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation.” While the rise of AI is bound to be at the top of their agenda, rebuilding trust in technology also...

Nicholas Stern The world must now face up to the fact that the increase in average global temperatures will surpass 1.5° Celsius, the more ambitious of the 2015 Paris climate agreement’s targets. That means devising a plan for managing the consequences—by increasing our focus on...

By Chander Gupta I am associated with a writers’ forum comprising of 30-odd members. The forum holds monthly meetings which are hosted on rotational basis by individual members. The host member proposes a literary topic for discussion in which all the ‘writer’ members participate by...

By Ashyashree Praharaj Inflation is among the most consequential economic challenges confronting households and policymakers.A sustained rise in the general price level reduces the purchasing power of money, disproportionately affecting lower- and middle-income households whose spending is concentrated on food, housing, transport, and essential services....

In April 2016, when the National Payments Corporation of India launched the Unified Payments Interface, few anticipated that a quiet public experiment would fundamentally alter how a billion people exchange value. Built on the simple premise of interbank interoperability, UPI turned complex bank account details...