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

As the backlash against Innocence of Muslims, a film on Islam, gains political momentum across geographies, I wonder whether the key driver of this violence, this intolerance is really a fragility, and not the protection, of the world’s second-largest faith. Read more

The angry Hindu will read Hinduism in a particular way. He will quote selectively from the Bhagwad Gita, the Vedas and the Upanishadas. He will breathe technology into shlokas and “prove” that India was a super-advanced nation millennia ago. Read more

When I wrote about Islam, I was hounded by Muslims. When I wrote about Hinduism, the Hindus attacked me. I have also faced angry Christians and Jews. Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains have been missing so far. Read more

Even though the legal position is clearly in favour of the Muslim Personal Law — and accordingly, the Delhi high court upholding the wedding of a 15-year-old Muslim girl is in tune with the law — a sense of unease has gripped the nation. 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

When Kapil Sibal says that blasphemous material either against religions or people — notably his leader, the Congress president Sonia Gandhi — should be removed from websites and social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter, we know it is the beginning of the end of free speech. Read more

Having personally been to Ground Zero less than a month after the world’s turning point — 9/11 — I tracked the news from around the world to see how society, politics and religion are intersecting with one another 10 years later. Read more

My gratitude to the One
Singular and inclusive
Secular and expansive
Limitless and unfathomable
For delivering Islam Read more

As Osama bin Laden begins his journey to the other side — spiritualists across religions say that for a week after death, his or her loved ones should think about him, help him pass through the darkness — I was taken a little aback by the ecstatic celebrations across the world, particularly in the US. Read more