Piety, not punctuality, is the politeness of princes. And none was more pious than the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh (1615-1659). As the eldest son of the emperor Shah Jahan, Dara Shikoh should have succeeded his father. However, Dara’s younger brother Muḥī al-Dīn Muḥammad (later the emperor Aurangzeb) practiced his own version of piety. His flexible […]

I usually don’t find it difficult to disagree with Mr. Amitabh Kant, the sherpa of Raisina Hill (there are no mountains in Delhi other than the Gazipur landfill, so it has to be a hill and not a mountain), but for once I cannot disagree with him on his recent comments on the lifting of

Himalayan states like Himachal and Uttarakhand are slowly going to pieces, literally, under the onslaught of cloudbursts, flash floods, land subsidence and collapsing infrastructure. In just the last four years (2022-2025) Himachal has lost 1200 lives and suffered a loss of Rs. 18000 crores in these disasters (and this does not include the indirect loss

COMPARISONS can be odious, unless there is a justification. Consider these two examples. On Sept 30, 2025, President Donald Trump and his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth summoned almost 800 US generals, admirals and senior enlisted officers to the Marine Corps Base Quantico. The civilian duo harangued the uniformed, be-medalled corps — men and women,

Most of us seek wisdom by reading tomes by wise men and Shashi Tharoor, but once in a while, going through a book for some entertainment and fun, we come across something that makes us think and exclaim: Hold on! This is bang on! Why didn’t I think of this earlier? The other day I

The United Nations General Assembly functions as an air-pump: it inflates the egos of national leaders. The UNGA provides them a stage in New York where, (in Shakespeare’s words), they can ‘strut and fret,…full of sound and fury’,’ before an audience of 193 peer countries. In 1945, the United Nations was established by the survivors of

I don’t fly much these days, mainly because I never know whether my plane is being flown by a pilot, co-pilot or auto-pilot. That’s a problem for me because these days the pilot is usually busy having photo ops with his proud mom and dad in the cabin, the co-pilot is busy bashing down the

A SINGLE bullet often becomes a pivot in history: Sarajevo, Dallas, Los Angeles, Memphis, and now Utah. And nearer home, Rawalpindi in 1951, and again in 2007. At Sarajevo, a Serb student Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife Sophie on June 28, 1914. Within a month, World War I broke out.