Blogs

By Christopher Mendonca The problem of pain and suffering has baffled humankind from the very beginning. In searching for an answer, we have often confused the problem of pain with the problem of suffering. The two are not necessarily identical. Pain is a sensation whose intensity can be measured. It is nature’s way of telling…

Chethan Kumar As a young democracy grows out of adolescence, its rolling out reels and reels of tales. If the first post office or a telephone connection paints one colour, the Stamp of a stock market scam or the ‘Jewel Thieves’ scandal paint yet another colour. If failure of a sounding rocket was a stepping…

Dr. B. Bala Bhaskar There are no winners in West Asia’s wars, and the unfolding conflict with Iran is unlikely to be an exception. At some point, each side will craft its own narrative of success. Yet the war—at the theatre of energy politics, sectarian contestation, regional dynamics and great power rivalry—is revealing deeper geopolitical…

If there is one thing the uniform teaches you, it is this: war is never as distant as it looks on a map. It travels quietly through economies, through emotions, through uncertainty – until it reaches the everyday life of ordinary people. Today, as conflicts continue beyond expected timelines, the world stands at a fragile…

War isn’t ending because both US and Iran want to claim victory. To win decisively, Trump needs boots on the ground, but that’s risky. Bombing Iran infra to bits won’t dismantle Iranian regime. Extending deadline again will be read as sign of Trump’s weakness Five weeks into the illegal US and Israeli war on Iran,…

Apollo to Artemis, plumbing is space travel’s Achilles’ heel – there are 96 bags of human poop on Moon Forget Mars. It’s not happening. You might make bulletproof rockets and cosmic wave shields, but where’s the toilet to last the trip? After 50 years of trying, the best we’ve got is the $30mn UWMS –…

In Part 1 of this series, we covered the Cardiovascular-Kidney-Metabolic (CKM) framework, which uses a holistic approach to risk assessment, as well as the new PREVENT cardiovascular risk calculator. This new calculator is an important step in the right direction because, as leading cardiologist Dr Mohit Gupta has recently published, Western cardiovascular risk calculators have historically…

20 mayors, 117 presidents of municipal councils, around 4,000 corporators across municipal corporations and municipalities and hundreds of Zilla Parishad and Panchayat Samiti members…. This summarizes BJP’s success in Maharashtra’s local self-government elections in 2026. The new generation would hardly believe that, until the 1990s, BJP in this very state had only a handful of…

With development, come contradictions, the Kerala kind. Thursday will see electors vote strategically Come Thursday, Kerala votes. And they must choose, in the main, between incumbent, CPM-led LDF, and opposition bloc, Congress-led UDF. What are the differentiators between the two in the state that is, undoubtedly, India’s most remarkable development story? Consecutive govts in Kerala…

Of all the disappointments in life, nothing is bigger than being told by a polite airport lounge staffer, that your credit card is no longer eligible for complimentary food. He doesn’t have to be discourteous to twist the knife. The more polite he is, the deeper is the wound. Then you remember, the pesky caller…