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Recently, I came upon a blog written by a well known yoga teacher by the name of Gregor Maehle. In it, Maehle berates Sharath Rangaswamy, a young Indian teacher who, as it turns out, is the grandson of the late Pattabhi Jois, founder of Mysore Ashtanga yoga. Several women had come out with...
Indian media outlets have been obsessed with air pollution in the capital Delhi over the past few weeks. According to Greenpeace, 22 of the world’s 30 most polluted cities are in India. The air pollution — not just in Delhi, but several northern Indian cities — has become a matter of...
Amid all the gloom and doom over the slow retreat of democracy, the past few weeks have come as a welcome relief for proponents of the liberal world order. Since the late 2000s, the election of right-wing, xenophobic and authoritarian leaders and the consolidation of power by Vladimir Putin in...
With a society that is entrenched in stuffy, patriarchal traditions well into the 21st century, India has always relied on women abetting their own empowerment. The feminist movement in India has for a long time has been responsible for raising awareness about the real, grass-roots issues facing...
In 2006, long before hashtags, Tarana Burke began a grassroots “me too” movement to try and reach women and girl survivors of sexual assault, particularly women of color in low wealth communities. In 2017, actor Alyssa Milano used “me too” as a hashtag, and it went viral. While much has...
I recently reviewed commentaries on the Indian Supreme Court's decision regarding the right to the title (ownership) over a piece of land in Ayodhya where the Babri mosque was built under the Mughal rule of Zahiruddin Babur more than 400 years ago. It is a spot that Hindus believe was the exact...
This year was an unusually wet one for Mumbai, the commercial capital of India. Until mid-September, the city received rainfall of 2,366 mm, which is 26% more than the usual average of 1,800 mm. This is an ominous trend of extreme weather events, a phenomenon the frequency of which is rising...
In 2016, India’s National Crime Records Bureau reported 338,954 incidents of violence against women, including 38,947 rapes, up from 309,546 in 2013. Forty percent of the victims were children. In the same year, only one-third of child sexual abuse cases brought to trial had resulted in...
Despite Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s resoundingly successful reelection earlier this year, Foreign Policy magazine expresses serious doubts about his ability to keep the promises he made during his initial election campaign and hold the unwieldy nation together. His promises of economic...
History’s arc is like a boomerang. Winston Churchill didn’t believe that Indians were capable of self-rule, once saying that “Indians are not fit to rule, they are fit to be ruled.” As adulation for Churchill is wearing off with the passage of time, The Guardian and The New York Times, the...
The TED website describes Kishore Mahbubani, a career diplomat from Singapore, as someone who “re-envisions global power dynamics through the lens of rising Asian economies.” This description is not just apt for Mahbubani but also for his new book, “Has the West Lost It?” The title may...
