The average Muslim is unlikely to vote any one party or candidate but is generally cagey about Hindutva-based politics. Read more

Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley;
Nothing’s so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.
– John Fletcher (1579-1625)

Malala in Pashtun means melancholy, a word that lies on the border of poetry and philosophy, and means more than just grief. Read more

A 40-year-old man caught begging in Delhi and sentenced to a year’s rehabilitation was left off after the judge took a lenient view, a report by wire service PTI said on Saturday. It’s a example of how, sometimes, morality and the law might clash. Read more

The UPA government’s minority welfare agenda, one of its prime planks, could be floundering due to inadequate outreach and discrimination, the very drawbacks it aims to plug. Read more

Muslims, from Libya to Hong Kong, have exploded again. The rage is against an anti-Islam film, made in the US, and cartoons in France. Read more

The Yamuna Expressway, a 165-km, six-lane glistening north Indian motorway, which a newspaper aptly described as the Yamunabahn, has cut by half the travel time between Delhi and Agra, the Taj Mahal city. Read more

My guide Zevit was particularly happy to show me around Haifa, a post-card Israeli town by the Mediterranean. This was her hometown after all. Read more

Amid a late afternoon pitter-patter of a monsoon downpour, which came after a long, bewildering summer wait, I reached for an Oxford Classics copy of War and Peace by Tolstoy, whose doctrine of non-resistance is said to have influenced Gandhi. The characters of Pierre, Andrew, Natasha, Nicholas and Mary hadn’t changed – they can’t – from my previous reading years ago, but my appreciation of them had. How would Tolstoy have shaped them had War and Peace been set in contemporary today? Read more

Muslims, like Hindus and Sikhs, will not like to surrender their personal laws because they are just that: personal. Read more

Salman Khurshid, the law minister, was until recently a good Muslim to have in government. Read more