Opinion

By Malay Mishra Zohran Mamdani took the oath of office as the mayor of New York, the largest and most important city of USA, at a decommissioned subway of Manhattan to symbolise his affinity with the city’s workers and marginalised people whose cause he said...

The global economic order is being rewritten. Wars in Europe and West Asia, US–China rivalry, the return of tariffs, and the erosion of multilateral institutions have turned trade into an arena of power rather than rules. Trade is now about security, resilience, and influence as...

When US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared that a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother had been gunned down by federal officials because she was committing “an act of domestic terrorism,” she was not making a factual claim. She was seeking a megalomaniac’s approval. Her boss, US...

By Bhaskar Nath Biswal India stands at a precarious crossroads where its demographic dividend is increasingly threatened by an invisible yet pervasive adversary: a deepening mental health crisis. Recent revelations from the Indian Psychiatric Society, shared ahead of their 77th annual national conference, paint a...

By Beata Javorcik While many people still view runaway population growth as today’s most urgent global challenge, falling fertility rates are the real demographic time bomb. Nearly two-thirds of people now live in countries where fertility is below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per...

By Chandra Bhushan There is a Hindi idiom — chutki lena — that loosely translates as teasing, trolling, mocking or putting someone down. Social media today is full of people taking chutki over air pollution in Delhi. The recent tweet by Chinese Embassy spokesperson, offering...

By Brahma Chellaney Last month, US President Donald Trump banned or severely restricted nationals of 20 additional countries from entering the United States, expanding the entry restrictions he put in place in June, supposedly to mitigate “national security and public safety threats.” But a cursory...

By Mayadhar Sethy Step into two neighbouring homes in rural Odisha and the first thing you notice is reassuring. In both kitchens, rice is cooking. On both plates, there is enough to eat. This quiet but significant achievement reflects years of public investment in food...

By Melvin Durai It has been more than a decade since companies started testing food delivery by drone, and yet I am still waiting for my first drone-delivered bucket of biryani. If you’re wondering why I used the word “bucket,” it’s because a restaurant near...

By Vittorio Quaglione Data-center investments hint at a coming shift in the AI race. Soon, if not already, reliable, affordable electricity will confer the decisive advantage in the sector. As Albert O. Hirschman argued in National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade, an economy’s...