New Delhi and Dhaka have quietly got the conversation going again. After a few weeks of frost that followed Sheikh Hasina’s virtual press conference from somewhere in India in early August, officials on both sides are back at the table, working out the details of a possible visit by Bangladesh Prime Minister Tarique Rahman to
The US House of Representatives has just cleared a tough new sanctions package aimed at Russia, and the part that has people in New Delhi sitting up is the authority it gives President Donald Trump to hit major buyers of Russian oil and gas with tariffs of up to 100 percent. India is right in
From October 15 this year, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is bringing in a Merchant Discount Rate – that’s MDR for short – of 0.4 percent on certain person-to-merchant payments that are above Rs 2,000. The key word here is “merchant.” You and I, as regular users sending money to friends, family, or
UPI Charges at 0.4% for Some Payments Above Rs 2,000 Read More »
Three Italian passengers somehow left the country without ever going through immigration. They flew in from Amritsar on a regular Air India domestic flight and less than an hour later they were on a Lufthansa plane heading to Munich. No immigration stamp, no formalities, nothing. Just gone. It happened in the early hours of 4
Xi landed in Delhi on Saturday afternoon after flying out from China that same morning. He went straight into the summit meetings that started around 2 pm. Later he had a proper bilateral talk with Modi on the side. By the evening, when Modi put up the big formal dinner at Bharat Mandapam for all
Why Xi Jinping Skipped the Dinner Hosted by PM Modi on BRICS Day 1 Read More »
New Delhi, September 13BRICS Summit at Bharat Mandapam is underway, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi just spoke quite plainly this morning. He told the leaders that under India’s chairmanship this year the focus stayed on four simple things: resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability. And he said they managed to turn the common ideas into something
The former Uttarakhand chief minister and senior Congress leader put out a post saying he’s quitting two of his party positions. It came right after the Enforcement Directorate recovered a pile of cash, gold and fancy watches from the house of his longtime aide, Chandan Singh Jeena. Rawat made it plain he doesn’t want anything
“Nepal has released water”, “Kosi is angry again”, “heavy rain in the hills”. This time the story doesn’t fit. Bihar got less rain than normal. From June till early September the state recorded about 601 mm, nearly 27 percent short. Still, more than two thousand villages in fourteen districts went under water. The Water Resources
Bihar is Flooded Despite Poor Rains and Nepal is Not the Reason: Here’s What is Read More »
The red flags in the forests of Bastar or Dantewada, the ambushes, the landmine blasts, the young men and women who disappeared into the hills carrying rifles. It started with a real place and a real fight over land. May 1967. A small village called Naxalbari in the foothills of the Himalayas in West Bengal.
Naxalbari to Dimagi Naxal: The Left’s Evolution in India Read More »
Gulzar was a simple daily-wage man, around 47. His son got hooked on chitta – you know that deadly drug that’s everywhere in Punjab these days. The addiction was so bad they even sold their house. On 6th September, Finance Minister Harpal Singh Cheema came to their village for some public meeting. Gulzar stood up
