Opinion

Nuclear weapons made wars of conquest between great powers unthinkable. After 1945, nuclear powers could still confront one another, but only indirectly, through proxy conflicts and peripheral crises. However bloody, these conflicts were not expected to approach the violence of the 20th century's two world...

Odisha is currently at a crossroads. The state has successfully transitioned from a disaster-prone identity to a development-surplus model. However, this success has created an aspiration gap. The modern Odia voter no longer votes for survival; they vote for quality of life. As noted in...

Friendship is a form of egalitarian relationship where mutual understanding, support, trust, interests, respect, equality, and dignity thrive to expand cooperation, minimise risks, and share both happiness and sorrow, thereby creating a society based on mutual dependency and solidarity. These values are crucial in friendships...

The applause in Washington when Israeli and US airstrikes killed Iran's senior political and military leaders was understandable. It was also unintentionally revealing. The premise behind decapitation strikes is not merely military. It is constitutional. It assumes that the leader is the regime, that authority...

By Melvin Durai During a recent public dance demonstration in China’s Shaanxi province, a humanoid robot performed kicks and twirls to the delight of adults and children. But things went awry when the robot strayed to the edge of the cordoned-off area. As it made...

By Jacques Attali In the 21st century, power no longer lies only in territory, capital, or technology. It lies in something far more elusive and finite: human attention. The jury verdict in a US civil suit, which found Meta and YouTube liable for deliberately addicting...

Peter Singer & Savita Pawnday In 2005, the United Nations World Summit, attended by more than 170 heads of state and government, made a political commitment to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. But in endorsing the Responsibility to Protect, or...

Ajit Ranade Imagine spending the best years of your life from age 22 to 29, in a waiting room. You are educated, ambitious, and capable. But the job that you are waiting for has odds worse than a lottery. So, you study harder, make an...

At a critical time of fuel scarcity, the push to the nearly a decade-old India’s Regional Connectivity Scheme—UDAN (Ude Desh Ka Aam Nagrik)—is confronting a hard truth: aviation cannot be socially engineered into viability. Despite a renewed push involving tens of thousands of crores in...

The oil-rich monarchies of the Persian Gulf are often described as petrostates. But the US-Israeli war with Iran has highlighted that they are also saltwater kingdoms, societies whose survival depends on desalination, or converting seawater into potable water on an industrial scale. Life in the...