The manicured streets of uptown Mumbai’s Bandra and Khar areas have long fostered a peculiar breed of celebrity activism that routinely mistakes the shield of an elite lineage for immunity from national law. Imran Khan, the nephew of Bollywood actor Aamir Khan, has enjoyed the multi-layered privileges of India’s entertainment aristocracy. Despite a career defined far more by inherited access than by cinematic triumph, Khan was handed high-profile launches on a silver platter.

After nearly four years in the air, Bhuvneshwar Kumar is back in India’s plans. Every swing bowler knows the feeling: the ball hangs in the air, and for a suspended moment, nobody can say which way it will go. For nearly four years, Bhuvneshwar Kumar’s international career seemed suspended in that moment. On October 6, the BCCI announced that the 36-year-old pacer had been included in India’s T20I squad for the five-match series in New Zealand. The opening match is scheduled

From an unlikely start in aviation, Smit Machchhar’s story is about the making of a pilot who found himself tested in the most terrifying circumstances. There are many ways to describe courage Captain Smit Machchar’s moment came with a knife at his throat and an aircraft plunging thousands of feet towards disaster. Seriously wounded after being attacked by his co-pilot, Machchhar, disregarding the human instinct for self-preservation, fought back in a bid to save his aircraft

Michael Burry made his reputation by seeing through the housing boom. Now he is turning his scepticism on AI by questioning the stories being told about it. Michael Burry has always had an uncomfortable relationship with consensus. When everyone else sees a boom, he tends to look for the balance sheet underneath it. Recently, when some of the globe’s most powerful executives began telling the public that Artificial Intelligence is something is both enormously valuable and dan

Sanjukta Parashar’s rise from Assam’s insurgency-hit districts to the frontline of India’s counter-insurgency apparatus marks a milestone in the long march of women into combat leadership. Earlier this month, Sanjukta Parashar became the first woman to command the CRPF’s elite Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA). Her elevation to Inspector General of this specialized jungle-warfare force marks a watershed moment in the history of India’s internal security apparatus

Vishal Chaturvedi has turned a deeply personal spiritual story into one of 2026’s biggest box-office surprises. In an industry where films routinely arrive with star salaries running into crores, lavish sets and multi-crore marketing campaigns, Hanuman Ansh is a striking anomaly. Made on a shoestring budget reportedly in the region of Rs. 2 crore, the ‘spiritual’ film opened last month to a modest box-office collection. Within weeks, however, audiences began taking a shine to

Air Marshal (retd.) Jeetendra Mishra brings discipline, integrity and command experience to the Ram Mandir Trust as it seeks to rebuild faith shaken by the donation scandal. The biggest challenge facing Air Marshal (retd.) Jeetendra Mishra, who was recently appointed first chief executive officer of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra in Ayodhya, can be articulated in a single word. It is not security or the vast machinery that keeps the Ram Mandir functioning. It is trus

Washington’s envoy to New Delhi is bringing an unusually blunt style to a relationship that prefers results over diplomatic choreography. Diplomacy usually rewards the careful sentence. But Sergio Gor, unbridled by diplomatic posturing, appears to prefer the ‘useful’ one. As his recent visit to India showed, Gor, ever since taking charge as the United States ambassador to India, has made a habit of saying plainly what previous American diplomats had only implied or altogether

Written off after her 2024 defeat, Smriti Irani’s return underlines the BJP’s continuing faith in one of its most combative political voices. Smriti Irani’s return to the BJP’s organisational high table is a reminder that in politics, defeat is often an intermission rather than an ending. For a politician whose career has been marked by spectacular rises and humiliating reversals, Irani’s latest comeback is almost on brand. Earlier this week, BJP president Nitin Nabin had nam

A hunger strike over alleged exam irregularities has turned Devendra Mahto into the most visible face of Jharkhand’s youth discontent. For nearly three weeks, Ranchi’s Jaipal Singh Munda Stadium has been the nerve centre of a student agitation over alleged irregularities in Jharkhand’s recruitment examinations. At its centre stands 33-year-old Devendra Nath Mahto, a student leader who has turned an indefinite hunger strike into both a political challenge and a test of the gov

Harshita Jakhar’s appearance at the Tour de France Femmes is signals India’s arrival in sporting arenas long dominated by Europe. India’s sporting successes have traditionally been concentrated in disciplines where geography or colonial legacy created favourable conditions. While cricket grew into a national religion, hockey delivered decades of global dominance. Wrestling, badminton, shooting and now, increasingly, chess have flourished through sustained investment and nur

While Indian politics has never been particularly gentle towards intellectuals, it was unusual even by Parliament’s standards for the Director of one of India’s foremost technological institutions to be dismissed with a sneer. Opposition leader and Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra shameful reference to Professor Veezhinathan Kamakoti, Director of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, as a “gaumutra expert,” reduced a lifetime of scien tific accomplishment to a sar

Yastika Bhatia’s maiden Test century at Lord’s crowns the rise of an elegant wicketkeeper-batter who has quietly become indispensable to India’s new generation. Critics may say that there are flashier cricketers than Yastika Bhatia. She does not possess the raw power of a Smriti Mandhana or the aura of a Harmanpreet Kaur. She rarely dominates highlight reels or social media clips. Instead, she has built her reputation through reliability – a quality far more vital. At a time

Even as his final World Cup ends in disappointment, Cristiano Ronaldo's influence on the game remains unmatched. At 41, when most footballers are remembered through grainy highlights and nostalgic documentaries, Cristiano Ronaldo was still trying to win a World Cup. Portugal's elimination at the hands of Spain in the Round of 16 has almost certainly brought down the curtain on the greatest international career the sport has seen without its ultimate prize. Ronaldo himself ack

Hokato Hotozhe Sema, who lost a leg in Kashmir, has redrawn the boundaries of military service and transformed India’s Paralympic imagination. While there are military decorations that reward courage under fire and sporting medals that honour excellence in competition, it is rare for the two to converge in one life. That they have done so in the career of Subedar Hokato Hotozhe Sema says as much about the changing face of India’s armed forces as it does about the country’s be

Kunal Shah’s rise from city entrepreneur to global head of WhatsApp signals that India is producing genuine architects of the digital age. For much of the internet era, the world’s defining digital products were imagined in California. The next chapter looks markedly different. Artificial intelligence, digital finance and ubiquitous connectivity have flattened the distance between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world. Increasingly, the most interesting ideas are emerging

For decades Champat Rai was the quiet custodian of Hinduism’s most consequential movement in recent times. Now the man who helped build the Ram Mandir finds himself confronting questions about the temple’s accounts. If Ayodhya has a living archive, it is probably Champat Rai. For decades, the bespectacled Hindu nationalist leader has been a fixture in the temple town, a man whose memory of obscure land records, court filings and forgotten episodes during the Ram Janmabhoomi m

For decades, Swapan Dasgupta made a career of diagnosing India’s political ailments. As a columnist, editor, author and public intellectual, the erudite and scintillating Dasgupta dissected challenged orthodoxies and defended the intellectual traditions of the Indian Right. However, following his new appointment as the new Finance Minister of a West Bengal in economic doldrums, he perhaps faces the most demanding assignment of his career. His supporters however are confident

A Class 12 student from Ranchi has done what few journalists, bureaucrats or politicians thought to do. Whereas most Indian teenagers spend their final year of school navigating the familiar maze of examinations and career anxieties, Sarthak Sidhant, a Class 12 student from Ranchi, Jharkhand, forensically examined the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) On-Screen Marking (OSM) system. Sidhant’s expose of the CBSE marking system has turned him into an overnight and u

Esha Singh’s dominance in Munich announces the arrival of a new kind of Indian shooting champion. Perhaps because of the nature of her sport, shooter Esha Singh announced her brilliance quietly, almost stealthily. Earlier this week, the 21-year-old Indian shooter stood amid one of the strongest pistol fields in Munich, Germany to snare a gold in the women’s 25-metre pistol event at the ISSF World Cup with a world-record score of 43. Munich is regarded as one of the toughest a