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Higher education is a transformative experience. Not only is there the opportunity to earn a qualification, master a new skill and gain access to much-admired profession, there is the advantage of learning in an entirely new environment, experiencing new cultures and making friends that become family. A university experience offers a life beyond the one…

India didn’t just fight Left Wing Extremism. It made it irrelevant. For years, Left Wing Extremism in India was seen as a law-and-order problem. It never really was. It was a vacuum. Where the state didn’t exist, something else stepped in—and for decades, that “something else” ruled large parts of the country with fear. What…

As US and Israel’s war continues against Iran, Gulf countries are really suffering. So dire has their security situation become, that there are leaked reports of Gulf officials pondering military action against Iran, and these have to be taken seriously.How can a region full of US military bases, personnel and hardware, be so vulnerable to…

The sun, the sea, and now the slots. Goa, India’s only legal casino playground, is quietly rewriting its own rules again. This time chief minister Pramod Sawant’s government isn’t merely tweaking licence fees or tightening audits. It is literally taking water away from farmers’ fields and handing prime irrigated land over to a gaming company….

When Amit Shah set March 31 as the target to eliminate Naxalism, it signalled a moment of unusual confidence in India’s long battle against leftwing extremism. Yet, the story of its decline is less about a single deadline, and more about a slow, uneven recalibration of state strategy – one that has steadily narrowed both…

Census must not record live-in couples as ‘married’. It defeats the purpose of capturing social changes  If a govt doesn’t measure x, does x not exist? Furthermore, what are the implications of govt refusing to measure x? Census 2027 will be recording live-in couples, who are staying in a household in a “stable union”, as…

People have always wanted to know the future. Long ago, they asked fortune tellers, astrologers, and people with crystal balls. Later, they started trusting “experts.” But experts can be wrong too. For example, just before the big Wall Street Crash of 1929, a famous economist said stocks would stay high forever—which turned out to be…

Will markets for prediction be any better at guessing the future than ‘experts’? Can they be manipulated? What will be, will be, but people want to see tomorrow, today. Our curiosity birthed oracles, astrologers, crystal gazers, and their analogues. When superstition became unfashionable, “experts” took over. And they could be spectacularly inaccurate, too: days before…

It’s a blockbuster, at the movies and at home “Everyone else has watched it. Except us,” Kamala declared angrily. I thought she was talking about Trump’s confusing press conferences. But the missus was having mid-life FOMO about something more predictable: Dhurandhar 2 – The Revenge. All the word-of-mouth publicity is propelling the movie to delirious…

The situation between Iran, a group called the Houthis, and the United States is getting more serious, and it could affect the whole world. First, the United States seems to be preparing to send more soldiers into the region. There are reports that they might plan missions that could last weeks, like attacking certain coastal…