Textbooks as Battlegrounds: The Perils of NCERT’s New Portrait of Mahmud of Ghazni
A quiet rewrite of the past risks hardening the present A quiet but seismic change has slipped into India’s classrooms. The new Class 7 NCERT social science textbook, Exploring Society: India and Beyond, devotes six pages to the “Ghaznavid Invasions,” recasting Mahmud of Ghazni as a fanatical iconoclast bent on forcing his version of Islam […]
Centralising Control, Offloading Costs: Why the New Higher Education Regulator Imperils Universities and States Alike
A Central Regulator With Shrinking Accountability The new higher education regulator Bill promises rationalisation but in practice concentrates unprecedented power in a single umbrella body while eroding mechanisms that once tied regulation to public funding and academic judgment. By abolishing the UGC, AICTE and NCTE and replacing them with the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan and […]
Meher Castelino, India’s First Femina Miss India & Pioneering Fashion Journalist
Meher Castelino, the trailblazing beauty queen who became the inaugural Femina Miss India in 1964 and later emerged as one of the country’s most influential fashion journalists, passed away on December 16, 2025, in Mumbai. She was 81. Early Life and Historic Pageant Victory Born in Mumbai, Castelino graduated from the prestigious Lawrence School in […]
Remembering Internationally Renowned Filmmaker, Director & Screen Writer Shyam Benegal
Remembering internationally renowned Filmmaker, Director and screenwriter # Shyam Benegal on his 91st birth anniversary (14 December) Probably one of the the greatest filmmakers from India Shyam Benegal was a legendary Indian film director, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker. Often regarded as the pioneer of parallel cinema in India, Benegal’s career spans over five decades, during […]
Mulk Raj Anand at 120: Champion of India’s Forgotten Lives
On this 120th birth anniversary of Mulk Raj Anand—born December 12, 1905, in Peshawar—his defiant credo endures: “Our tragic age demands poetry of courage and not whimpers about the inevitable end of all maya.” Far more than a pioneer of Indo-Anglian fiction or “India’s Charles Dickens,” Anand forged novels that elevated the sweeper, coolie, and […]
A Song, Not a Political Football: Vande Mataram, Parliament and the Politics of Memory
Vande Mataram: Echoes of History in Parliament’s Heated Debate Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay penned *Vande Mataram* in 1875 as a hymn evoking the motherland’s natural splendour, later expanded in his 1882 novel *Anandamath*, set amid the devastating Great Bengal Famine of the 1770s that claimed millions due to drought and East India Company exploitation. This war […]
Babri Politics Returns to Bengal: How Manufactured Outrage and Opportunistic Mobilisation Threaten a Fragile State
The sudden “Babri Masjid” moment in Murshidabad exposes a deeper political script aimed at fragmenting Bengal’s electorate before 2026. A New Storm in Bengal Elections are only months away in West Bengal, and the shadows of Ayodhya—once buried, once forgotten—have suddenly resurfaced in the unlikeliest of places: Murshidabad. The laying of a so-called “Babri Masjid” […]
The Second Exile: When Madness Claimed the Soul of Ayodhya
On December 6th, the calendar turns to a date etched in India’s modern history not by pride, but by profound sorrow. It marks the day, three decades ago, when a historic structure fell—and, more tragically, when a foundational idea of the Indian Republic, the sanctity of shared space and secular tolerance, was violently fractured. Eminent […]
India’s Enduring Economic Arc: Triumph, Shadows, and the Credibility Imperative
India’s economic saga spans ancient pre-eminence, colonial devastation, and a modern resurgence that positions it as the world’s fourth-largest economy in nominal terms and third in purchasing power parity, with nominal GDP at $4.19 trillion. Recent data from the National Accounts Statistics reveal an 8.2 percent real GDP growth in the July-September 2025 quarter—a six-quarter […]
From UGC to HECI: Another Quiet Burial of Nehru’s Vision for Higher Education
The Union government is set to introduce the Higher Education Commission of India (Repeal of University Grants Commission Act) Bill in the Winter Session of Parliament. If passed, the 68-year-old University Grants Commission will cease to exist, replaced by a new, unitary regulator—the Higher Education Commission of India (HECI). On paper, the move promises “less […]
