Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi may have been born a bania — someone from a community whose vocation from time immemorial has remained trade and moneylending in India's rigid caste pyramid. However, few in a country where one's birth still defines one's (...)
Something extraordinary happens to Muslim societies around the world during the holy month of Ramadan. It is a surreal experience and only those who have been touched by it would identify with what I am trying to say. Ramadan brings out the best in (...)
Sooner or later, this was bound to happen. Given the way the BJP and its parivar have been despoiling India, saffronizing all national institutions, this was bound to happen.
As if tying a Kashmiri artisan to the front of an Army jeep as "human (...)
Diplomacy has not been arguably the strongest point of the Middle East's engagement with the world. This is why persuading President Donald Trump to begin his first foreign visit from Saudi Arabia is nothing short of a diplomatic coup. It is even (...)
ALL politics is local, said US politician Tip O'Neil. Under Narendra Modi, nothing is local anymore. Writing for Aljazeera, Prof. Apoorvanand of Delhi University explains how India is permanently in election mode these days and insurrectionary (...)
THE Machiavellian principle of "divide and rule" (or divide and conquer, from Latin dīvide et īmpera) still reigns supreme. In an interesting analysis in Hindustan Times, Sunita Aron explains how the BJP successfully breached the Muslim vote bank in (...)
THE scenes of young Kashmiri girls, most of them in school uniforms and hijab, throwing stones at security forces have stunned India and people around the world. The iconic image of an angry Afshan Ashique, a football coach who once wanted to play (...)
There's no stopping the juggernaut called Narendra Modi. After the recent electoral successes, the Prime Minister looks totally unassailable, the lord of all he surveys. Even his worst critics like Aakar Patel and Rajdeep Sardesai have concluded (...)
The more things change at the United Nations, the more they remain the same. The United States and Russia, the two superpowers, have been taking turns to belittle and disempower the world body that they both helped create in the wake of the World (...)
April 6, 2017 marked the 100th anniversary of the United States' reluctant plunge into the World War I. Fearful of foreign entanglement, America stood watching for three years while on the other side of the Atlantic young men slaughtered each other. (...)
Arab and Muslim intellectuals never tire of blaming many of their woes on the world media and a certain lobby that apparently controls it. The Western media narrative is often seen as being skewed and dictated by its economic and political (...)
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is seen by many as an upright and fearless leader who consistently delivers on the promise of good governance. Perhaps Erdogan's biggest contribution has been the successful demolition of the myth that the (...)
After Narendra Modi's effortless leap from Gujarat to Delhi in 2014, one thought that nothing would surprise us pseudo-seculars anymore. But how wrong we were and how little do we know our own country! Despite its overwhelming victory in Uttar (...)
THE spectacular BJP show in Uttar Pradesh has set the cat among the pigeons. For the struggling opposition and nearly 20 percent Muslims, this victory seems even more defining than the outcome of 2014 elections.
In many ways, it is. The BJP's (...)
THE way of love differs from all others; those love God owe allegiance to no nation or sect but the way of their beloved, said Jalauddin Rumi, the great Sufi philosopher and poet.
Contrary to the widespread fiction, Islam spread in much of South (...)
FEED a monster and there is every danger of you ending up as its fodder. What makes the killing of yet another Indian techie in the United States last week — the second such tragedy in February — even more tragic and ironic is the fact that Indian (...)
WHEN in doubt, go back to basics. That's what the BJP is doing in Uttar Pradesh. Staring at what looks like a humiliating debacle in India's largest state, the party has chucked the facile "sab ka saath, sab ka vikas" mantra and is pushing its core (...)
GLOBALIZATION has become a much despised world today, thanks to the rise of right in the US and Europe and growing sentiment against immigrants and refugees. Not long ago though, Western pundits prescribed it as the panacea to all the problems of (...)
Mr. Gorbachev! Tear down this wall!" As Donald Trump goes about walling America in and shutting out the world, those prophetic words of Ronald Reagan, deified by the Republicans as the greatest US president since Abe Lincoln, ring in my (...)
There is no end to the continuing carnage in Myanmar. Over the past year or two, several independent international agencies and rights groups like Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International have come out with numerous damning reports, (...)
AS India turns 68 as a constitutional republic, there's jubilation all around. The country can view its eventful journey and strides it has taken on all fronts with immense pride. Few countries facing such overwhelming odds have grown at such a pace (...)
I HAVE always had a thing for Pakistani soaps. I love them for their superb storytelling and performances and their exquisite Urdu. And not just me, the whole of India instantly fell in love with them when Zindagi TV started airing them some three (...)
THAT the BJP should welcome the Supreme Court judgment banning the use of religion and caste in politics is perhaps the biggest irony of Indian politics. The party after all owes its phenomenal growth and ascent to its successful use of religious (...)
DURING our last visit to Turkey in the autumn of 2013, we spent less than a week in Istanbul. But it felt like as if we had lived all our life in the ancient city that is hard to define until you have experienced it yourselves. Istanbul has that (...)
YET another attack in the heart of Europe and yet another mad rush to tie it to Islam and its followers. The Berlin truck attack last week on a Christmas market, killing 12 innocent shoppers and reminding many of the horrific Bastille Day outrage in (...)