It’s not every day that you see the courage of an ordinary citizen in public. The courage gets stronger when you see that its source is a 14-year-old girl. And it is in one of the rarest of the rare cases, we have a Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousufzai warding off and fighting with the Taliban, a force that even the nation’s inglorious army is unwilling or unable to face. Read more

Come, dear sisters and brothers
Let’s rejoice on this anniversary
And celebrate our perversions Read more

I’m still not sure about how the Higgs boson is anywhere close to god, but if hundreds of millions of people, across the world believe that there is an inexplicable divinity around this particle, I suspect a new religion is on the way. The poor particle and its team of physicist-creators may explain the phenomenon in hundreds of ways, but the forgotten fact remains that every frontier of science opens up new doors to the unknown. Read more

It was 7.30 am — early for me. But we had to reach Auroville by 8.30 am and the cost of being late was to miss the Matrimandir experience. The taxi was on time. Read more

Since September 15, 2008, when Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and the world teetered over the edge, the religion of money has been challenged by the poor reeling under the onslaught of corrupt decisions by vested interests, the intellectuals wondering whether capitalism as is being practiced in its corrupted form today is the right developmental model for nations, and the vested interests who are wondering how to weaken the light that threatens to expose the darkness surrounding centuries of inter-generational wealth creation. Read more

It is a political issue. The hate-filled, victim-laden objection to Salman Rushdie is converting religion into a game of publicity. So, if Darul Uloom Deoband doesn’t like what Rushdie wrote more than 23 years ago in his 1988 book, The Satanic Verses, and wants to remind its constituents about that by preventing Rushdie from speaking at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), it is a problem that Deoband needs to fix — not the country. Read more

Four days from the 10th anniversary of September 11, as India lived through yet another bomb blast, this time at New Delhi’s High Court that left 11 dead and 76 injured, it’s a sad return to the past. Read more

As expected, reactions to France banning the full face veil on Monday, with a fine of 150 Euros, have been varied. Read more

A lot of condemnation has followed the recent violence in Afghanistan that has left 23 people dead. This violence, in turn, followed a US pastor Terry Jones overseeing the burning of the Koran on March 20. Read more

By terming the strikes against Libya as a ‘Crusade’, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has turned a foreign policy issue into one of religion. Read more