|By Narendra Kaushik| New Delhi: It was on a Bhai Duj, a Hindu festival celebrated on the last day of five-day long Diwali.  One of the sisters of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee had come from Agra. During one of the discussions she asked Vajpayee whether he could help her in a case she faced from a land development agency ...

|By Shashi Tharoor| NEW DELHI – One hundred years after the start of World War I, the world has been commemorating that seminal event. Described as “a war to end all wars,” the Great War, as it was called at the time, failed to live up to its billing. Those who fought and died in it would not have expected its ...

By Mari Marcel Thekaekara | New Internationalist| I grew up in the 1970s, in Calcutta – now Kolkata. I was bombarded with new ideas and alien concepts. That meant being plunged from a conservative Catholic convent, and a practically Victorian society and mindset, to a world where I listened to Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Ravi Shankar, Pink Floyd, protest music ...

|By John S. Katzman| NEW YORK – Capitalism has produced many high-quality products and services, from smartphones to high-speed transport and compelling entertainment. Yet the profit motive, essential in so many fields, seems to have disappointed in one crucial area: education. The former spend 23% of their revenue on recruiting new students, compared with a mere 1% spent by non-profit institutions. At ...

|By Jeffrey D. Sachs| NEW YORK – The horrific Ebola epidemic in at least four West African countries (Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria) demands not only an emergency response to halt the outbreak; it also calls for re-thinking some basic assumptions of global public health. We live in an age of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases that can spread quickly ...

|By Narendra Kaushik| New Delhi: When Haryana CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda says he is keen to contest from Indri, an assembly constituency in Karnal District, in the upcoming Haryana polls, it is the clearest possible hint of his complete loss of confidence in the bigoted politics he has pursued during the last ten years of his rule. The 14 assembly constituencies ...

|By Sanjib Guha| Their achievements did not create much of a flutter a few years ago when siblings Neel (then 13) and Deep (then 11) earned the distinction of being the youngest MBA graduates of the country, a record of sorts. The feat just had few mentions here and there. Having completed their MBA from Indian Management School and Research (IMSR) ...

|By Mark Wheeler, London Metropolitan University|The Conversation| Celebrity humanitarians have had a profound impact upon the practice of international political communication. New forms of political participation have emerged as celebrity activists have reconfigured politics for a more fragmented and image-conscious public arena. But until the current controversy concerning Israel’s military action within Gaza, celebrities have largely steered clear of the ...

|By Connor Bamford and Andrew Shaw, University of Glasgow| The Conversation| The current West African ebolavirus outbreak, which has now reached more than 1,000 cases and resulted in more than 800 deaths, is a reminder of the often unpredictable nature of viruses and the difficulties in finding and developing vaccines and antivirals. The outbreak appears to have focused efforts. Anthony ...

|By Maria Spiropulu| PASADENA – Almost a century ago, the first galaxy beyond our own was discovered, and within a decade the theory that the universe is expanding was first proposed. Since then, astounding technological developments have contributed to revolutionary progress in physics, astronomy, cosmology, and the life sciences. Today, physics stands at a new threshold. On July 4, 2012, the ...