• Tibet and China’s Contrasting Narratives

    No struggle in the world is as unequal as the one between Tibet and China. Beijing’s position in Tibet is unassailable, reinforced by a network of all-weather roads, airports and an expanding railway line that are integrating the world’s highest, largest and remotest plateau more closely to the mainland. China uses its economic weight to…

  • The Educational Heritage of India

    India’s earliest teachers were the Gurus who taught in gurukulas and ashrams located far away from the hustle and bustle of towns. It is no surprise that the Vedas, which are the earliest known oral books containing the thoughts of a highly civilised society, are replete with exquisite references to Nature and the concept of…

  • How to Read a Book

    How to read a book? The question seems easy; fairly obvious, in fact. You pick a book and start reading it. Of course, this works only if you are a literate person, otherwise it can be a bit of nightmare. But… if we go back to the question and give it a deep thought, we…

  • What to Eat?

    Eating the right foods provides our body with what it needs to function properly and stay strong and resilient towards overcoming and preventing disease. When we change the way we eat, we get to experience the health benefits food has to offer. Food, if used right, can act as medicine that can help the body…

  • Understanding Meditation

    Meditation is a vast subject and there have been many developments throughout the ages and many variations among the different religious traditions. But broadly speaking the basic character of meditation takes one of two forms. The first stems from the teachings which are concerned with the discovery of the nature of existence; the second concerns…

  • The Gossiper: A Bihari Folktale

    There lived a gossiper in a certain village. He was notorious for spreading rumours about others. But the villagers loved him, for he was an excellent entertainer. One day, the gossiper went to a confectioner in the neighbourhood. The confectioner was sitting idle, for he had no customers to deal with at that particular time.…

  • The Story of South-Asian Muslims

    As with the Muslim world more widely, the single most important thing to understand about patterns both of Muslim history and of Muslim consciousness in South Asia is the tremendous rise of Muslim power up to the seventeenth century, and its steep decline thereafter. Before 1947, the glorious history of Muslim rule and cultural achievement…

  • What Flowers Mean to Us

    Steven Pinker, an experimental psychologist best known for his works The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works, argues that one of the reasons for our success as a species is our ability to recognise, value, classify and locate distinctive forms of plant life. Our capacity to appreciate the beauty of flowers is evidence of…