Opinion

An expensive market is ahead. Banks are tizzy. Markets rock and roll. Costly loans may cause a rate-rise phenomenon first time in almost three years. The Reserve Bank of India’s October 2026 repo rate hike to 5.50% was its first increase since February 2023, when...

By DK Giri Swiss President Guy Parmelin’s return to India so soon, he said, was “both a pleasure and a testament to the excellent state of bilateral relations.” On a three-day state visit, his second trip this year after attending the AI Impact Summit in...

By Bruhaspati Samal For decades, a curious contradiction has remained embedded in the working structure of the Central Government: employees belonging to the same broad public-service system are governed by different weekly working regimes merely because one category is described as “administrative” and another as...

By Dr Sankalpa Satapathy When a friend quipped “your choice” on the revelation that another friend was taking anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medicines, it revealed the profound ignominy associated with mental health. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental...

By Agnia Grigas On 23 September, just a week after NATO aircraft shot down a drone that had entered Lithuanian airspace from Belarus, a Russian military helicopter flying out of Kaliningrad briefly breached Polish airspace. Neither intrusion was an isolated episode. A growing catalogue of...

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak The worldwide horrors of war, conflict, injustice, exploitation, marginalisation, inequality, everyday violence and brutality on a mass scale are designed to numb people and erode their civilised, humane self-confidence and their trust on each other. The aim of these manufactured crises...

By Malay Mishra The Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), an inadvertent creation of the head of the highest judiciary, has announced a nationwide agitation from 10 October. It will start from the very site that was the battleground for a restive Gen Z barely three months...

These days, we often hear and read in the news that artificial intelligence (AI) is pushing humanity toward disaster. Well-known researchers, tech leaders, and scientists regularly warn that fast-growing machine intelligence could make humans obsolete or even lead to extinction. Because these warnings come from...

On 28 February, the United States and Israel shocked the world by launching strikes across Iran and assassinating the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Civilian casualties quickly mounted, including 150 civilians—mostly children—killed when American missiles struck an elementary school. Iran duly retaliated by targeting...

The largest energy-supply shock in modern history has delivered a surprising lesson: the global energy system is remarkably adaptable. When the Iran war disrupted passage through the Strait of Hormuz, roughly one-fifth of global oil supplies and liquefied natural gas was affected. But worst-case scenarios...