[By Chetna Verma] Agra – The young thrive on dreams for a brighter tomorrow. Most aspire to have a comfortable home, a rewarding career and a loving family – and they work hard to put together the pieces of this perfect life, bit-by-bit. But what if one never even got a decent shot at fulfilling one’s ambitions or breaking free ...

[Prashant Kumar | The Conversation] In a bid to tackle its record air pollution, Delhi has banned cars from travelling on alternate days over the first two weeks of this year. It’s better than nothing, but it won’t be enough. The Indian capital has the dubious accolade of being regularly-cited as the most polluted city in the world, with air ...

[By Shashi Tharoor] NEW DELHI – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surprise visit to Lahore, Pakistan, on Christmas Day brought his hyperkinetic year of global diplomacy to a headline-grabbing close. It also raised serious questions about the direction of the highly fraught relationship between the two nuclear-armed neighbors. Since Modi took office in May 2014, India-Pakistan relations have experienced more ups ...

[By Rakhi Ghosh] Khurda – She is a hardworking government school teacher and an attentive mother and wife today but she has been through her fair share of hell. The incident that changed Seema’s (name changed) life forever happened over 17 years ago on July 2, 1996. She had just taken up a job as a social worker, fighting for ...

Dr. Jeewan Jyoti Sidana runs a chain of educational institutes in Amritsar of India’s Punjab State which covers 100 villages of the border district and who has become a beacon of hope for the 1.8 lac population in the area. Dr. Sidana believes that education is the only way to transform India where the need of the hour is for women ...

A new film may have dangerous consequences for small hunters, writes Mari Marcel Thekaekara. ‘Kill the hunter-gatherers’, the last surviving people in Africa who still subsist through foraging and hunting, appears to be a new fad doing the rounds. Put like that it sounds exaggerated, but examine the jargon, the sophisticated plea to be ‘firm’ with poachers. The call to ...

[By Lavanya Regunathan Fischer & Devadatt Kamat] Delhi – Recently, hundreds of people once again took to the streets of Delhi as part of the annual Queer Pride Parade to drum up support for equal rights for people of diverse gender and sexuality and rally for “collective freedom from patriarchal oppression”. It was only last year that the Supreme Court ...

Increased awareness has transformed the reform system set up by the state for juvenile delinquents into an incentive for crime. [By Narendra Kaushik] New Delhi: “Don’t talk too much to them. It can be dangerous. They are hardened criminals”, Ram Singh (name changed), an employee of Special Home for Boys on Magazine Road at Majnu ka Tila, forewarned me uncorking ...

Vijay Diwas (Victory Day) is commemorated every year on 16th December in India as it marks its military victory over Pakistan in 1971 during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971. The end of the war resulted in the unilateral surrender of the Pakistan Army and subsequent secession of East Pakistan into Bangladesh. This day, however, does not merely mark the celebration of ...

A successful meeting in Bangkok between National Security Advisers of India and Pakistan has paved the way for Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue between the two countries. [By Narendra Kaushik] New Delhi: Happymon Jacob has done for years what National Security Adviser Ajit Kumar Doval, his counterpart in Pakistan Nasir Janjua and Indian and Pakistan Foreign Secretaries S Jaishankar and Aizaz Ahmad ...