News & Politics

[By Shashi Tharoor] NEW DELHI – On January 17, Rohith Vemula, a PhD candidate at the University of Hyderabad in India’s Telangana state, hanged himself. Even in a country of 1.2 billion people, a single death can have a major impact. Vemula was a Dalit – a member of what was once known as the “untouchables,” at the bottom of ...

[Monica Grady] There is nothing more certain in life than death – a cheerful thought for a dismal February. Even though we are aware of that inevitability, we don’t expect death literally to strike out of an empty sky, which reportedly is what happened to Kamraj, a bus driver in Vellore, a town in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. ...

[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 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 ...

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 ...

[By Shashi Tharoor] Thiruvananthapuram, INDIA – Even as world leaders were meeting in Paris to address climate change, the city of Chennai (formerly Madras), the capital of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, reeled under the onslaught of the heaviest rainfall in 104 years. The city, home to five million people, has virtually shut down, with roads flooded and ...

[By Narendra Kaushik] New Delhi: Let me begin with a PS (post script) Many of the politicians in the country particularly the ones belonging to the old guard, be it Mulayam Singh Yadav, Ramvilas Paswan, Prakash Singh Badal, M Karunanidhi, Mayawati and others, rose proclaiming lofty ideals pertaining to socialism, secularism and social justice. Their baptism into political life exuded hope ...

[By Mari Marcel Thekaekara|New Internationalist] Paris is in focus again as the climate change talks take centre stage. All over the world, people are watching and waiting, pinning their hopes on these talks, praying desperately that something useful, something good will come out of it all, despite the cynics. At a local level, where I live in India, the subject ...

[By Narendra Kaushik] New Delhi: Let me come straight to the point. To say that Bihar election results are a resounding negation of Political forces which are out to monger hate in the society and thus, create communal divisions is, to put it succinctly, only a half truth. I agree Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Amit ...

[By Shashi Tharoor] NEW DELHI – The headlines out of India in recent weeks have often made sickening reading. Startlingly, the central protagonist in most of these stories is that most peaceable and innocent of animals, the cow. A Muslim man was beaten to death by a mob in a small town an hour from New Delhi in response to ...