Blogs

How fire helped create humans — and even ChatGPT Some people are worried about gas shortages. But the worry isn’t really about gas. Deep down, it’s about something bigger — what it means to be human. Humans are, in a way, children of fire. About 1.5 million years ago, our ape-like ancestors learned how to…

War doesn’t just hurt people and cities. It can also damage the oceans, even though we rarely see it. Right now, many warships from the United States are in the Arabian Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. At the same time, the Strait of Hormuz is very tense because Iran has used explosive boats to attack…

In the early 1980s, when Maoists had just entered Dandakaranya forest after their disastrous adventure in Bengal, India’s new PM Indira Gandhi had commissioned a study. She wanted to know, unlike Bengal, where the police defeated the Maoists (who were called Naxals at that time) under the leadership of Siddhartha Shankar Roy, can there be…

‘Anyone’ and ‘anything’ touched by the divine cannot remain untouched by LOVE! To love and be loved is the deepest desire of the one who breathes, and even the one who remains still, else why would the sun pour its radiance over the moon through lifetimes! ****** “What is love?” Saloni, a beautiful girl with…

The article is in two parts, giving out the silent help both Russia and China are giving to Iran to sustain this war. India needs to watch the battlefield to adapt to the new challenges being faced by the spectrum Warfare. Part I: The new battlefield and the urgent need to watch the war live…

Somewhere in the finance ministries of Islamabad, Dhaka, and Manila, officials are running the same calculations they ran in 2022. How much can we subsidise? How long can we hold the tariff line? How do we explain to households why electricity just got more expensive while the government insists everything is under control? The Iran…

This week we look at a troubling shift in the Indian-American experience. A surge in anti-Indian and anti-Hindu rhetoric online is raising questions about identity, visibility and belonging for one of the United States’ most successful immigrant communities. We also track a case that has sparked debate within the diaspora after a US citizen of…

For most of the twentieth century, national security was measured in divisions of soldiers, fleets of aircraft carriers, and the destructive capacity of nuclear arsenals. In the twenty-first century, however, the foundations of power are increasingly economic. Microchips, rare-earth minerals, digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence systems, financial networks, and maritime supply chains now constitute the strategic…

Not just currency notes, public spaces at large need more homage to wildlife, less to man   It’s bad times for Churchill. Even as people everywhere are grumbling about the Iran war, they are remembering he plotted the 1953 coup d’état, the ‘original sin’, which poisoned the country’s relationship with the West. And in his homeland,…

Uttarakhand, the land where the Ganga originates, should ideally have the cleanest stretch of the river. Yet, a recent audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India reveals a troubling paradox: the river begins to lose its purity within a short distance of its origin. According to the audit, the water quality of the…