Blogs

When we talk of public health anywhere in the world, whether it is disease elimination, targets, surveillance and related efforts, the first reference point is often the World Health Organization. It is difficult to imagine a world without a central body coordinating efforts to prevent and eliminate diseases. Yet it has only been active since…

“From our childhood upward, we have been taught only to pay attention to things external, but never to things internal; hence most of us have nearly lost the faculty of observing the internal mechanism. To turn the mind, as it were inside, stop it from going outside, and then to concentrate all its powers, and…

The recent resolution in the House of Representatives of the United States seeking formal American recognition of the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, while calling for accountability for those responsible, marks a significant shift in global understanding of that conflict. This acknowledgment stands in sharp contrast to the position taken by the US during the Bangladesh Liberation…

The idea of a group tour often brings to mind a swarm of matching hats following a flag-waving guide. But if you look closer at that crowd, you’ll see a fascinating mix of personalities forced into a small ecosystem. A group tour is essentially a social experiment on wheels. When you cram thirty strangers into…

Until a few years ago, the internet worked like a city of shopfronts. You could ideally build a website, maybe polish your search rankings, run campaigns, write engaging blogs, and then wait for people to walk in. In essence the discovery was messy, but it was visible. A user searched, scanned ten links on the…

There is a particular kind of institutional dishonesty that does not involve lying. It involves announcing the right destination, then doing nothing meaningful to get there, and treating the announcement as the work itself. The first SteelWatch Corporate Scorecard, released this week, has put numbers to that behaviour across 18 of the world’s major steelmakers….

The key question in the 2026 Kerala assembly election is whether the state will return to its predictable cycle of power alternation, or whether voters will make history by electing the incumbent for a third consecutive time. For decades, Kerala’s politics has largely been a contest between two coalitions — the CPM-led Left Democratic Front…

Being a city boy whose imagination was mostly fed by adventure stories, I was fascinated by the idea of climbing a tree to pick fruit. So, when I discovered that the house we were visiting had a line of guava trees in the garden laden with fruit, I really had no choice. Guava trees tend…

One month into the US-Israeli assault on Iran, the conflict has produced outcomes few anticipated or desired. Indirect peace talks between Washington and Tehran — facilitated through Oman and Qatar — were still active when the strikes began on February 28. Goalposts shifted weekly: from degrading Iran’s nuclear programme to neutralising proxy networks or enforcing…

“O chevalier, wine is that wine, poured by the hand of the Unseen into the cup of the heart and drunk by the eye of the spirit. The people became drunk with the passing of the cup, but I became drunk with the one who passed it,” said the prominent 12th-century Persian scholar and Sufi…