Opinion

Melvin Durai Imagine you are waiting at a bus stop, reading something on your phone, when a student walks up. He’s also waiting for the bus. You look up from your phone and notice that he’s carrying a chemistry textbook and wearing a T-shirt with...

Maciej Kisilowski Tisza party’s success shows that even a highly entrenched regime can be defeated at the polls, despite institutional capture, media dominance, and electoral engineering. It provided proof of concept for the global new right, demonstrating that a politics opposed to human rights and...

Bhabani Shankar Nayak In society, the insidious politics of crony capitalism is accelerating at an unprecedented pace, supported by the reckless growth of AI and other technologies designed to dominate, domesticate, and dehumanise people and their societies. Alongside this, an illiberal politics of cowardice is...

Janak Raj The US dollar’s share in global foreign reserves peaked in 2001, and has been declining ever since. But while this trend is likely to continue, it is progressing very slowly, meaning that the greenback will retain its relative dominance—and the Global South will...

The Iran–Israel conflict has abruptly exposed the fault lines in India’s growth story—energy dependence, imported inflation, and policy vulnerability. With the Strait of Hormuz under threat, even a modest spike in crude prices can ripple through the economy, raising fuel costs, widening the trade deficit,...

Democracy is inherently fraught. At its core lies the difficulty of translating individual preferences into a coherent social choice, a problem famously captured by Nobel laureate economist Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem and later developed by another Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen, in his 1970 book Collective...

By Bhaskar Nath Biswal The annual unveiling of global university rankings is often met with a mix of anticipation and introspection within the corridors of higher education. These rankings, such as those published by QS Quacquarelli Symonds, serve as more than just a competitive scoreboard;...

By Bruhaspati Samal There was a time when the dawn of technology was celebrated as a sunrise of hope—machines that would assist, not replace; systems that would empower, not erase. Today, however, beneath the glittering sky of Artificial Intelligence and the so-called “cloud revolution,” a...

Rajdeep Sardesai In poll-bound Kerala, the election noise is loud—but the silences are louder. On a recent trip through the coastal state, I noticed something unsettling. In town after town, familiar small tea shops—the lifeblood of everyday conversation—were shuttered. Not all, but enough to be...

Chiara Cordelli We live in a world of senseless suffering and impending catastrophe, where it would seem the idea of moral progress has become unintelligible. Two epochal crises afflict contemporary society: the rise of anti-democratic forces and climate change. But what if today’s tragedies turn...