Nalini Joshi’s coronation as New South Wales’s Scientist of the Year signals that in the quantum age, mathematics may be civilization's most strategic science. The 2025 Premier’s Prizes for Science, held beneath the chandeliers of Government House in Sydney, offered an implicit rebuke to the age of scientific celebrity. New South Wales’s top honour did not go to a physicist chasing particles, a chemist inventing materials or a doctor fighting disease, but to a mathematician.

Kaamya Karthikeyan’s skiing odyssey to the South Pole crowns a teenage career built on astonishing willpower and endurance. At 18, Kaamya Karthikeyan has become the youngest Indian and the second-youngest woman anywhere to ski to the South Pole. It is a feat that sounds deceptively neat in a newspaper headline which somehow fails to capture the gruelling reality of this stupendous achievement involving weeks of hauling a sled across the Antarctic nothingness, in temperatures

Tarique Rahman’s return is less a democratic revival than a portent of harder politics for Bangladesh and for India. Bangladesh has a habit of mistaking movement for progress. When Tarique Rahman, the acting chairman of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), returned after 17 years abroad to much fanfare, his supporters hailed it as the homecoming of democracy. Perceptive observers in India and elsewhere, however, saw the re-entry of a man whose long absence had burnished hi

From airports and ports to power grids and knowledge systems, the tycoon’s rise tells the story of an India determined to build at scale despite relentless political and geopolitical resistance. On Christmas Day, as the year wound down, India quietly crossed an infrastructural Rubicon. The long-awaited Navi Mumbai International Airport, delayed for years by litigation, land politics and environmental activism, finally opened its runways. For Mumbai, it promised relief from ch

Aditya Dhar’s ‘Dhurandhar’ is a formidable and technically assured spy thriller that has thoroughly unsettled India’s pro-Pakistan liberal film establishment. With ‘Dhurandhar’, director Aditya Dhar has not merely made a successful film but has effortlessly demonstrated that cinematic authority in India no longer belongs to critics by inheritance. On the surface, Dhar’s latest film, whose worldwide gross currently stands at a staggering Rs. 710 crores, has all the classic tro

Scarred by Islamist violence, Salman Rushdie now reserves his sharpest anxieties for Hindu nationalism, exposing a troubling asymmetry in his moral vision. Salman Rushdie has long been celebrated as literature’s most famous survivor. Few writers have paid a higher price for metaphor, irony and irreverence. A fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 turned a novelist into a fugitive; for a decade he lived under police protection, changing addresses as often as pronoun

19-year-old Devvrat Rekhe has revived one of Hinduism’s most forbidding oral rituals, proving Bharat’s ancient faith has not yet lost its voice in an age of consumption and constant noise. Earlier this week, as the winter light thinned over the Ghats of Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi paused from his usual duties of state to applaud a feat that belonged to a far older civilisation than the modern republic he governs. Modi, himself the Member of Parliament from the holy

Hitherto India’s most combative cricketer, Gautam Gambhir now faces the most bruising test of his leadership following India’s humiliating Test defeats on home turf . Gautam Gambhir built a reputation on defiance. As a batsman he thrived on hostility, noise and pressure. He was, at his best, a specialist in moments that made others flinch. India’s two most defining white-ball victories of the modern era - World T20 2007 and the World Cup final of 2011 - were shaped by Gambhir

Chirag Paswan has turned a once-fractured party into the NDA’s sharpest new instrument, giving the BJP its most credible alternative to Nitish Kumar yet. For years, Chirag Paswan occupied an awkward corner of Bihar’s politics - too slight to be taken seriously, too famous to be dismissed. But the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections have reordered the hierarchy. His Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas), written off after a family split and an electoral drubbing, has re-emerged as the NDA

After a crushing win, Bihar’s long-time chief returns with renewed mandate and a reminder of his political agility. Nitish Kumar has been declared many things over the years: wily survivor, serial shapeshifter, ‘sushasan babu,’ ‘Mr. Clean’ and, more recently, a fading star. But when the results flashed on Friday evening as the NDA sweeping past the 200-seat mark in the 243-member Assembly, one line captured the mood from Patna’s bylanes to its party offices: “Bihar ka ek hi s

Struggling NCP heir Parth Pawar’s newest scandal revives old doubts about Maharashtra’s most accident-prone dynast. A Rs. 300-crore land deal gone awry in Pune has once again cast an unflattering light on Parth Pawar, son of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader and Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar and grand-nephew of the formidable Sharad Pawar. Parth has long been a magnet for controversy, the sort of heir whose every attempt to prove his worth seems to end

Once the voice of Appalachian disillusionment, America’s Vice-President now plays to the MAGA gallery, as remarks on his Hindu wife expose the uneasy marriage between faith and opportunism. Few politicians embody America’s moral whiplash quite like Vice-President J.D. Vance. Once a sceptic of Donald Trump and the politics of resentment, he has reinvented himself as Trumpism’s most polished apostle. This week, that balancing act came perilously close to collapse. At a Turning

Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren’s mix of pride and pragmatism defines both his rise and the fragility of his alliances. Hemant Soren has never been one for grand theatrics. Measured, even brooding, the Jharkhand Chief Minister exudes a quiet defiance that conceals a calculating mind. The latest rupture with his allies in Bihar ahead of a key Assembly election has once again brought to the surface the contradictions that have long defined his politics: a leader proud of his roots ye

Ashley Tellis’ arrest exposes how Chinese influence operations and think-tank funding networks have blurred the line between scholarship and statecraft. For decades Ashley J. Tellis was the cleverest man in the room. A Mumbai-born academic who climbed to the summit of Washington’s strategic establishment, he helped craft the Bush administration’s civil-nuclear deal with India, taught realism to idealists, and wrote with the serene assurance of one who believed himself indispe

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize honours Venezuelan leader of opposition Machado even as Donald Trump’s self-aggrandising claims fail to...

Sonam Wangchuk, Ladakh’s most famous ‘innovator,’ risks becoming another case study in how local unrest is amplified for global agendas....

In Mohanlal’s iconic performances, audiences saw not a distant superstar but a relatable everyman whose emotional register was complex...

Soft-spoken Jaismine Lamboria has turned family pedigree into India’s first featherweight world crown. When Jaismine Lamboria climbed...

As Gen Z protests reshape Nepal’s political landscape, a former judge takes the reins. Beset by mass protests and clamorous calls for...

Imran Khan’s political innings continues in defiance against Pakistan’s generals. Imran Khan has never been one for half-measures. As a...