Opinion

Akira Kawamoto Yoshihide Suga has been selected as the new prime minister of Japan. He will replace Shinzo Abe, who announced his resignation last month for health reasons after almost eight years in office. Japanese and international observers are now asking whether the Abe government’s...

Vijay Darda  All of you must have read about the dreaded Kalia Nag (serpent) in our mythology. The lake in which it lived had become so poisonous that even the birds and animals passing over it used to die. Even the river Yamuna had become...

Melvin Durai The polls look good for Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president in America, putting him as many as 12 percentage points ahead of President Donald Trump nationally. But public surveys also looked good for Hillary Clinton in 2016; yet, Trump managed to...

Shivaji Sarkar It is slobalisation across the globe. The world has applied the brakes on the economy due to an unprecedented civilizational lockdown. India, termed as the engine of global growth, has taken a big hit and it may take quite a few years for...

Ajit Ranade The economy shrank by nearly one-fourth during the first three months of this fiscal year. Much of this was due to the harsh lockdown initiated in March. Roughly three-fourths of the economy was practically shut for a month, after which there were a...

Sanjay Kumar Panda Actress Vidya Balan wearing the Shri Ganeet saree, woven with mathematical formula in the traditional tie & dye (Bandha) technique by Bhagabat Meher in the promotion of her film Shankuntala Devi, won huge appreciation. Later, the same saree was put to e-auction...

Jayati Ghosh The World Bank’s Doing Business index has been both conceptually and operationally suspect since its inception in 2003, but mainstream economists have only recently started to criticise it. Although the Bank’s own recent acknowledgement of some of the problems is welcome, the index...

Kamal Baruah “Good morning aviators. This is your captain speaking. Today’s exercise is dog-fighting.” After 34 years, Tom Cruise returns with his Maverick. He did (actually he didn’t) fly an F-18 doing Cobra and Vertical Charlie at the ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ trailer recently. That reminds...

Bharat Jhunjhunwala About 20 years ago, a press officer of the Chinese Embassy in Delhi sought a meeting with me. She asked me at the end of the discussion whether I thought China was India’s friend or foe. I replied ‘foe.’ There, the exchange ended....

Dr. D.K. Giri Defying predictions by some observers and experts, India is participating in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting (SCO) in Russia. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh was there, his second visit to the country in the last two months, and met his Chinese counterpart, apparently...