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  • Two Iconic Five Star Marshals of The Indian Armed Forces

    |By Col NN Bhatia (Retd)| We have had three five star Marshals- late Field Marshal KM Cariappa known as an  Officer and a Gentleman, late  Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw famous for  soldiering with dignity and Arjan Singh  the first and the only officer...

  • Will Modi’s promise retrieve Indian talent?

    |By Narendra Kaushik| New Delhi: On Sunday when Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked around 1.8 million Indian expats in Madison Square Garden, New York, to draw inspiration from ‘Pravasi Bharatiya’ Mahatma Gandhi and return to India to pay their debt ...

  • Illegal Abortions: The foetal scourge

    With abortion in India becoming an instrument of family planning and abortion laws being misused, there are myriad socio-cultural practices in India that has changed its course and the concept of abortion has taken on a different form.  |An Exclusive...

  • Doongar Singh – A Pakistani Brigadier Looks Back to an Indian JCO

    |By Brigadier Mehboob Qadir (R)| It was mid 1972. We had just arrived in Ranchi from Agra, badly shaken and bruised, after a fateful train journey, during which we lost a fellow officer, killed by an armed escort needlessly, and another missing. We w...

  • Lord Of The BP 638

    |By Col. NN Bhatia (Retd)| The Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 is synonymous with liberation of Bangladesh that commenced with Pakistan launching of Operation Chengiz Khan on 3 December 1971 through pre-emptive strikes on 11 Indian airbases. The war effec...

  • Tea gardens of Dooars transforming into gardens of death

    |By Sanjay Pandey| The picturesque tea gardens carpeting West Bengal’s Dooars region are gradually turning into graveyards as starvation death continues to stalk plantation workers. “There is no starvation death in tea gardens of Bengal,” said state ...

  • Why India’s persecuted tribes are marking their alternative independence day

    [By Sarah Gandee] In the minutes before the clock struck midnight on August 14-15 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, made a now-hallowed speech to the nation on the eve of its independence: Long years ago, we made a tryst with...

  • 90% of the Police Force in the Country works more than 8 hours a day

    According to a study by the Bureau of Police Research & Development, Government of India, 90% of the Police Staff currently work for more than 8 hours a day. 68% of Officers report that their staff works for more than 11 hours a day and 28% repor...

  • The philosophy of the Soldier Mountaineer Colonel Narinder Kumar ‘Bull’!

    [By Col NN Bhatia | A Preface] The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of the man. – Anonymous The Regimental Centre Officers’ Mess in Ranikhet provides the most grandeur view of the eternally majestic sno...

She Is The Ideal Role Model ‘Veer Nari’ – Bimla Devi

Riti S, Team PB7 Dwarhat though a non-descript small town along the serpentine road, amidst cedar and pine trees, is a heart-captivating destination in the Kumaon hills with numerous ancient temples and mind blowing sightseeing tourist destinations to explore, relax and rejuvenate and the newly constructed Kumaon Public School for the service personnel’s children. It is also the recruiting ground ...

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Two Iconic Five Star Marshals of The Indian Armed Forces

|By Col NN Bhatia (Retd)| We have had three five star Marshals- late Field Marshal KM Cariappa known as an  Officer and a Gentleman, late  Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw famous for  soldiering with dignity and Arjan Singh  the first and the only officer to have been elevated to Marshal of the Indian Air Force who died on Saturday, 16 September 2017. I have had no interaction with the ...

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Why India’s persecuted tribes are marking their alternative independence day

[By Sarah Gandee] In the minutes before the clock struck midnight on August 14-15 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, made a now-hallowed speech to the nation on the eve of its independence: Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny … At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake ...

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Gujarati vigilante violence on Dalits sparks protest

[By Mari Marcel Thekaekara | New Internationalist] In India, Dalits are killed over and over again. Every single day. Beaten, tortured, murdered, raped, stripped and paraded naked through the streets of their villages and towns, forced to drink urine, eat human excreta, humiliated in the most inhuman ways every single day in India. And with total impunity in most cases. These ...

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India’s Antiquated Penal Code

[By Shashi Tharoor] NEW DELHI – A number of seemingly unrelated controversies in India actually have one important element in common: They all relate to criminal offenses codified by India’s British imperial rulers in the mid-nineteenth century that India has proved unable or unwilling to outgrow. The problematic features of the British-drafted Indian Penal Code include the prohibition of “sedition,” ...

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Peace with Pakistan?

[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 ...

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Commemorating the War of 1971: Vijay Diwas

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 ...

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Why India and Pakistan met in Bangkok

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 ...

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Child brides: every two seconds

The United Nations calls child marriage a ‘violation’. Yet, despite its near total worldwide illegality, it continues to thrive in many areas of the developing world, writes Kevin Childs | New Internationalist Recently, an interesting hashtag has been trending on Twitter. #TheStrengthToSayNo campaign is a joint initiative between Penguin Books and BetterIndia.com, and is inspired by the life story of ...

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Toilet talk: meeting one of the world’s grand challenges with innovation

[Karl Linden] How is it possible that 2.4 billion people lack access to improved sanitation facilities in 2015? While many westerners use their bathroom time as “me time,“ 40% of the world’s population may be pooping outdoors, in an unsanitary latrine, or in a plastic bag and launching flying toilets to dispose of their waste. The environmental impact of the ...

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