The organizers of the Palestinian aid flotilla have achieved a stunning victory over Israel in the international court of public opinion. It is a victory that Gandhi would well have understood. By pitting unarmed protestors (okay, so a few wielded kitchen knives when their ship was attacked) on a humanitarian...

Caught Between Maoists, Jihadis and a Hard State

India has been beset by violent insurgencies and secessionist movements practically from the very moment the independent nation was founded in 1947. The Indian state has consistently responded with brute force, unwilling to brook any breach in its authority and territorial integrity...

When the administration rolls out the red carpet to welcome Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Washington next week, the real action won't be around the elegantly set tables at the Obama's first state dinner. It will be over at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. That's right: The same folks...

Talkin' Bout a (Second Genetically-Engineered Privatized) Green Revolution

The Cold War is over! The Cold War is back! With the appointment of Rajiv Shah to head USAID, it's deja-vu all over again for the Obama administration. Welcome to Camelot redux, the 1960's re-engineered for the 2010s.

Michelle Obama's stylish...

It's not often one finds photographs of Parsis on display in the heart of Paris. But that is just what strollers along the Seine can find this fall. The photographs, by Sooni Taraporevala, are part of the Quai Branly museum's biannual exhibition Photoquai. It is free and open...

Anyone who watched Slumdog Millionaire or read Suketu Mehta's Bombay: Maximum City remembers the scenes of police torture, how harrowing they were for the victims, how casually banal they were for the perpetrators. Last week, American journalist Joel Elliott got to experience this first-hand. Stumbling upon a group of uniformed...

I confess that I have never been to Afghanistan. Like most of my friends, I don't know anyone who has served there or who hails from the war zone. I would expect, therefore, not to come face-to-face with the human cost of this long drawn-out war. But I have. I...

On October 2, 1869, exactly 140 years ago, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born. Dubbed Mahatma, or great soul, he was one of the most radical thinkers and activists who ever lived. Were he alive today, I have no doubt Gandhi would be utterly appalled at the direction the world...

India's new-media savvy Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor has tweeted up a domestic political tempest in a country where sensitivities are ever on a hair-trigger alert for any sign of religious or class offense. Asked by a journalist via Twitter how he felt about traveling "cattle class"...