Shoumojit Banerjee

West Asia’s combustible geometry suggests that any strike on Iran has a habit of widening into systemic crises that no single power can neatly contain Barely eight months after Operation Midnight Hammer, Washington and Jerusalem have once more moved from calibrated warning shots to direct blows against Iran. In broad daylight on Saturday, Israel, with overt American participation, launched a “preventive attack” on Tehran, triggering an immediate exchange of missiles and pushing West Asia into...

Pt. Kota Venkatachelam Few debates in Indian history have been as charged or as enduring as the argument over our antiquity. How old India’s civilisation truly is, and who gets to decide that? Long before social media polemics and political appropriation hardened positions over the Aryan Migration theory and its counter, the ‘Out of India,’ a small group of scholars waged a more forbidding war over dates, dynasties and inscriptions. Among the most uncompromising of them (though by no means...

Robert Duvall (1931-2026) Robert Duvall, who has died aged 95, was one of the last great craftsmen of American cinema. A man of many faces, he was, like his contemporary Gene Hackman, an ‘actor’s actor’ in every sense of the term. Duvall was admired not for volatility, glamour or visible virtuosity, but for something rarer and harder to teach - an instinct for truth. With absolute integrity to his craft, Duvall inhabited his roles in his long and varied six-decade career. His greatest...