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The book (which we reviewed in 2021), is two things in one: it is a relatively straightforward chronicle of eight centuries of Indian history, a period that gave rise to many things thought of today as quintessentially Indian, from biryani to the Hindi language

it offers powerful evidence, backed up with hundreds of examples from Professor Eaton’s scholarship, that Indians before the arrival of the British saw each other and themselves not through the lens of religion, as the leaders of the country today would have their citizens believe, but through the varifocals of language, ethnicity and community.

It is not uncommon to encounter, among a certain class of English gentleman, the notion that, on balance, India did not do so badly from British rule. Not only were Indians spared the horrors of French or Spanish—or, worse, Belgian—colonisation. But the British built the railways, the postal system and the administrative infrastructure of the country. They left behind the gifts of parliamentary democracy and the English language. In under 300 pages, Shashi Tharoor, a former under-secretary-general of the UN and a serving member of parliament in India, demolishes those arguments

ust a few hours after Hamas launched its assault on Israel, India’s prime minister was among the first world leaders to respond. In a strongly worded statement, Narendra Modi condemned the “terrorist attacks” and said India “stands in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour”.

it was not a sentiment restricted only to the upper echelons of Indian government. As Azad Essa, a journalist and author of Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, said: “This messaging gave a clear signal to the whole rightwing internet cell in India.”

In the aftermath, the Indian internet factcheckers AltNews and Boom began to observe a flood of disinformation targeting Palestine pushed out by Indian social media accounts, which included fake stories about atrocities committed by Palestinians and Hamas that were shared sometimes millions of times, and often using the conflict to push the same Islamophobic narrative that has been used regularly to demonise India’s Muslim population since the BJP came to power

Indian leopard injures six in Bangalore school

A male leopard which entered a school in the Indian city of Bangalore injured six people trying to capture it.

A recent wildlife census estimated that India has a leopard population of between 12,000 and 14,000.

Britain's World War I Army included Indian children as young as 10-years-old fighting against the Germans on the western front

One of the youngest boys involved in direct combat was a "brave little Gurkha" called Pim, 16, who was given an award for valour by Queen Mary while he was recuperating in hospital in Brighton

"In the case of a 10-year-old, it should have been pretty obvious that they were underage,"

The young prince Babur, descended from Timur on his father's side and Genghis Khan on his mother's, finished his conquest of northern India in 1526

Babur was a refugee from the fierce dynastic struggles in Central Asia; his uncles and other warlords had repeatedly denied him rule over the Silk Road cities of Samarkand and Fergana, his birth-right. Babur was able to establish a base in Kabul, though, from which he turned south and conquered much of the Indian subcontinent.

Babur called his dynasty "Timurid," but it is better known as the Mughal Dynasty - a Persian rendering of the word "Mongol."

Between 1405 and 1433, Ming China under the rule of Zhu Di, sent out enormous armadas of ships into the Indian Ocean commanded by the eunuch admiral Zheng He.

dwarfed European ships of that century — even Christopher Columbus's flagship, the "Santa Maria," was between 1/4 and 1/5 the size of Zheng He's.

Along with dozens of baoshan, each armada included hundreds of smaller ships.

Tens of thousands of farmers rolled into India's capital Tuesday on tractors festooned with Indian flags, overshadowing a traditional military parade on a national holiday. They broke through barricades, clashed with police and occupied the ramparts of the 17th century Red Fort – a tourist attraction and symbol of Indian power.

t was one of the biggest protests in New Delhi in living memory, posing a fresh challenge to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was reelected in 2019 in a landslide

"We came here for the farmers' support! Because they're not getting what they want,"

More than 100,000 protesters have taken part in a peaceful march in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, chanting slogans against Narendra Modi’s new citizenship law.

organised by an umbrella group of Muslim and civil society organisations

More than 40% of Hyderabad’s estimated population of nearly 7 million people are Muslims.

A glut of sugar has prompted India’s industry body to start a campaign to encourage Indians to eat more.

The Indian Sugar Mills Association (ISMA) said it wants to bust myths about sugar and its health effects.

At the launch of the website, India’s food secretary Sudhanshu Pandey told local media that sugar’s reputation is not deserved.

Dick Burchell, a 77-year-old former Belknap County commissioner, speak of old-timers. “The people I’m closest to,” Burchell says, “the people I tried to represent, they’re traditional. They’re hard-working and down-to-earth. They’ve never made a lot of money, and now the forces of our economy are tilted against them.”

As Burchell sees it, “There’s such an imbalance between these working-class people and affluent second homeowners. There’s a real difference between their local conservatism and a more global way of looking at things.”

Black Lives Matter, Burchell believes, is a “myopic” organization that’s “fomenting violence” to serve a globalist agenda. “There’s some very powerful forces driving it,” he says, “Wall Street establishment types. Globalization works for them.”

On Feb. 4, 2019, a Facebook researcher created a new user account to see what it was like to experience the social media site as a person living in Kerala, India.For the next three weeks, the account operated by a simple rule: Follow all the recommendations generated by Facebook’s algorithms to join groups, watch videos and explore new pages on the site.

The result was an inundation of hate speech, misinformation and celebrations of violence, which were documented in an internal Facebook report published later that month.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story“Following this test user’s News Feed, I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” the Facebook researcher wrote.

The report was one of dozens of studies and memos written by Facebook employees grappling with the effects of the platform on India. They provide stark evidence of one of the most serious criticisms levied by human rights activists and politicians against the world-spanning company: It moves into a country without fully understanding its potential impact on local culture and politics, and fails to deploy the resources to act on issues once they occur.

The Murty Classical Library of India, whose first five dual-language volumes will be released next week, will include not only Sanskrit texts but also works in Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Prakrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and other languages. Projected to reach some 500 books over the next century, the series is to encompass poetry and prose, history and philosophy, Buddhist and Muslim texts as well as Hindu ones, and familiar works alongside those that have been all but unavailable to nonspecialists.

While the canon of surviving Greek and Roman classics is fairly small, the literature of India’s multiple classical languages includes thousands upon thousands of texts, many of which, as the writer William Dalrymple recently noted, exist only in manuscripts that are decaying before they can be translated or even cataloged.

to some scholars, the project also comes as a timely if implicit rebuke to the Hindu nationalists of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, with its promotion of a unitary Indian identity based on selected Sanskrit religious classics.

NEW DELHI: A Silicon Valley company has been fined by the US Department of Labor for paying just $1.21 an hour to eight Indian employees it had flown in from its Bangalore office to install computer systems at its Fremont headquarters, the San Jose Mercury News reported on October 22.

A state government in India promised to introduce a bill to grant coveted “backward” status to a relatively prosperous caste group, officials said Monday, in an effort to quell protests that have raged for the past four days.

The protesters, members of the Jat caste group, had blocked roads around the capital, set fire to railway stations and cars, and temporarily shut down a crucial canal that is a major source of the city’s water. Nineteen people were killed in the violence in surrounding Haryana State, and fears of water shortages led New Delhi to close its schools to conserve its supply.

The main thoroughfare in the area, Grand Trunk Road, which had been reopened on Sunday, was blocked again by fighting on Monday morning, the police said. Still, a state official said, 80 percent of the roads that had been closed were open again on Monday morning.

Killer Meteorite Did Not Hit Indian Man

Though it first appeared as if a bus driver in India was killed by a meteorite this week, scientists and local officials say his death was more likely caused by

“a land-based explosion.”

ndia has denied visas to a team from the United States government responsible for monitoring religious freedom, the group said in a statement this week.

The organization, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, had planned a trip to India, scheduled to begin this week, to assess religious liberty in the country.

Robert P. George, the group’s chairman, said that the team was “deeply disappointed” by the Indian government’s action.

Pakistan has shut down several religious schools run by the Jaish-e-Mohammad militant group, Punjab province's law minister has said.

Fourteen people were arrested in a police raid on a mosque and seminary near the city of Daska, officials said.

Seven Indian soldiers and six militants were killed in the gun battle at Pathankot, which lasted four days when heavily-armed gunmen entered the base dressed in Indian army uniforms.

Few can imagine how unlikely this is. From the Fifties to the Seventies, there was serious debate on how imminent the Communist Revolution was in India. The future was red. Now of course no one takes Communists or even Communism seriously. The Soviet Union collapsed without anyone firing a shot. Leninism proved to be a delusion which could not survive the 20th century.

Why did Communism fail so abysmally? Marx had a fascination with Capitalism and admired its immense productive potential. He and Engels advertised the advent of globalisation in their youthful Communist Manifesto. His ideal of Socialism was timed for well after the maturity of Capitalism.

Communism’s luck continued and Capitalism suffered the Great Depression. It looked like the Revolution was imminent. Lenin had conflated Imperialism and Capitalism. This enhanced the appeal of Communism for the colonies. Stalin consigned millions to concentration camps but the idea that the Soviet Union was the hope of the world remained strong. Victory in the Second World War and then taking over Eastern European countries enhanced the reputation of the Soviet Union. China had its own Revolution which confirmed Lenin’s wisdom that the Communist revolution would start in the backward countries, not developed ones as Marx may have thought. India was supposed to be the next ripe fruit to fall. The CPI had blotted its copybook by supporting the British rulers during the war, as for them the fight was for defence of the Soviet Union. They denounced independence as illusory and launched a premature Revolution in Telangana. Stal

Social networks are now so deeply embedded into global culture that it feels irresponsible to think of them as some exogenous force. Instead, when it comes to misinformation, the internet is a mere cog in the larger machinery of deceit.

There are other important gears in that machine: politicians and celebrities; parts of the news media (especially television, where most people still get their news); and motivated actors of all sorts, from governments to scammers to multinational brands.

It is in the confluence of all these forces that you come upon the true nightmare: a society in which small and big lies pervade every discussion, across every medium; where deceit is assumed, trust is naïve, and a consensus view of reality begins to feel frighteningly anachronistic.