For a man who once seemed immovable, Viktor Orbán has exited the stage with surprising procedural grace. After 16 years of uninterrupted rule – the longest period by any serving leader in the European Union - Hungary’s most formidable political operator since the Cold War recently conceded defeat to Péter Magyar and his insurgent Tisza party, which secured a two-thirds majority on the back of record turnout. At a time where strongmen often cling to power, Orbán’s quiet accept

With Preeti Pawar’s win at the recent Asian Boxing Championships in Ulaanbaatar, India’s new boxing vanguard has finally come of age. In the hard geometry of the boxing ring, there is little room for flourish. Yet for 22-year-old Preeti Pawar, each bout seems to carry the suggestion of a canvas. At the in Ulaanbaatar, the youthful Preeti’s unanimous 5–0 dismantling of Huang Hsiao-wen, a three-time world champion and Olympic medallist, was a statement that Indian women’s boxin

Nirupama Menon Rao’s diplomacy of denial collides with the ugly reality of Pakistan’s history of sponsored terror against India. There is a particular kind of Indian diplomat – one who is retired, refined, erudite and reliably detached from consequence - who resurfaces from time to time with the same prescription to mend bridges with Pakistan. This prescription advocates restraint, dialogue and a fresh process to ensure that nothing fundamental changes. Nirupama Menon Rao has

For years, Rupali Chakankar embodied a certain kind of political ascent common to regional satraps: loyal, organisationally useful, and closely aligned with the power centre of her party – first, the undivided Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and later the NCP faction led by the late Ajit Pawar. Her journey, from a Pune-based party worker to chairperson of the Maharashtra State Commission for Women, was less a story of ideological crusade than of careful navigation within a p

Ali Larijani, the Islamic Republic’s consummate insider, dies as his carefully managed crises spin beyond control. In the labyrinthine politics of Iran’s Islamic Republic, few figures were as quietly indispensable as Ali Larijani. He was never one for the theatrics of revolutionary zeal nor the blunt force of military command as typified by the Revolutionary Guards. Larijani was something subtler and, in many ways, more valuable: a fixer. He was regarded as a man who could na

Nepal stands at a rare political crossroads. Six months after violent protests shook the Himalayan republic and forced the exit of former prime minister K. P. Sharma Oli, voters have delivered a sweeping mandate to a new generation of leadership. At the centre of that political earthquake is Balendra Shah, the 35-year-old rapper-turned-politician whose Rastriya Swatantra Party secured a commanding majority in the parliamentary elections of March 5. Few figures better capture

Menaka Guruswamy’s likely entry into Parliament will make history, but it also exposes the curious theatre of liberalism in West Bengal’s ruling party. When India’s Parliament next convenes its Upper House, it is likely to witness a historic first. Menaka Guruswamy, a senior advocate of the Supreme Court of India, is poised to become the country’s first openly lesbian Member of Parliament. Her path to the Rajya Sabha comes through nomination by the All India Trinamool Congres

After Ajit Pawar’s death, Rohit Pawar moves swiftly to claim moral authority, and perhaps the future of a fractured dynasty. When the tragic plane crash near Baramati on January 28 killed Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister, Ajit Pawar, the immediate focus was on loss. But in the days that followed, the attention has inevitably shifted to succession and the future of the Nationalist Congress Party, regardless of the factions. At the centre of it all stands Rohit Pawar, Ajit’s

Paras Dogra’s record-breaking Ranji season has carried Jammu and Kashmir into uncharted cricketing territory, offering a quieter counter-narrative to decades of turmoil. Indian domestic cricket rarely pauses to take stock of its longest servants. But the spotlight suddenly turned on 41-year-old Paras Dogra, captain of Jammu and Kashmir, achieved a historic milestone when his latest innings of 58 against Bengal in a semi-final made him the fastest player to reach 10,000 runs a

Guyanese minister Vikash Ramkissoon’s calm defiance in Hindi turned a parliamentary slight into a lesson in power, memory and India’s farthest civilizational echo. Some politicians raise their voices when challenged. Vikash Ramkissoon raised a language. In Guyana’s Parliament, where debate usually proceeds in the safe neutrality of English, an opposition lawmaker chose to question Ramkissoon’s knowledge of Hindi. The insinuation was familiar and faintly patronising, the sort

A female suicide attacker signals how Pakistan’s longest insurgency is mutating and why the state still has no answer. Hawa Baloch Shot on a mobile phone in the dark hours before a recent coordinated wave of attacks across Pakistan’s restive Balochistan province, a chilling video has become emblematic of the province’s struggle with the Pakistani state. It showed a young woman calmly firing at security forces, smiling at the camera and delivering what the Balochistan Liberati

India’s Commerce Minister has turned marathon trade talks into a muscular instrument of statecraft. At first glance, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal does not resemble the romantic idea of a trade negotiator. There is little of the bonhomie of Geneva salons about him, less still of the lyrical globalism that once animated India’s approach to free trade. Yet it is precisely this flinty and transactional temperament that has delivered what both he and Brussels call t

Gita Gopinath tells India to look past tariffs and focus on the air it breathes but speaks from the IMF’s Olympian perch. Gita Gopinath has the air of someone who expects to be listened to and usually is. Soft-spoken, rigorously precise and conspicuously unimpressed by political fashion, the IMF’s First Deputy Managing Director speaks less like a public intellectual than a judge reading out a finding. At Davos this week, she delivered one such verdict on India. Forget tariffs

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