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The very idea of the British Raj—the British rule over India—seems inexplicable today.

Indian written history stretches back almost 4,000 years, to the civilization centers of the Indus Valley Culture at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Also, by 1850 C.E., India had a population of some 200 million or more.

Britain, on the other hand, had no indigenous written language until the 9th century

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."

The Qajar Dynasty was an Iranian family of Oghuz Turkish descent that ruled Persia (Iran) from 1785 to 1925

Under Qajar rule, Iran lost control of large areas of the Caucasus and Central Asia to the expansionist Russian Empire, which was embroiled in the "Great Game" with the British Empire.

Peacock Throne.

The origins of the caste system in India and Nepal are shrouded, but it seems to have originated more than two thousand years ago. Under this system, which is associated with Hinduism, people were categorized by their occupations.

Although originally caste depended upon a person's work, it soon became hereditary. Each person was born into a unalterable social status.

Reincarnation is one of the basic beliefs in Hinduism; after each life, a soul is reborn into a new material form. A particular soul's new form depends upon the virtuousness of its previous behavior.

we sent emails to more than 6,500 randomly selected professors from 259 American universities. Each email was from a (fictional) prospective out-of-town student whom the professor did not know, expressing interest in the professor’s Ph.D. program and seeking guidance. These emails were identical and written in impeccable English, varying only in the name of the student sender. The messages came from students with names like Meredith Roberts, Lamar Washington, Juanita Martinez, Raj Singh and Chang Huang

We computed the average response rates for each category of student (e.g., white male, Hispanic female), dividing the number of responses from the professors by the number of emails sent from students in a given race or gender category.

Professors were more responsive to white male students than to female, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese students in almost every discipline and across all types of universities

India To Be World's Fastest Growing Economy: Keeping It Going Will Be The Difficult Trick

So, a predicted growth rate of 7.3% for the last quarter of last year, with that rate expected to be maintained in the year to come is good news.

Well, there’re worries about the present too but as ever in an economy we need to look at the short term, where macroeconomics holds sway, and also at the long term, where it’s microeconomics all the way down.

The Haryana Panchayati Raj (Amendment) Act disqualifies from local political office citizens who have been formally charged with serious crimes, citizens who are behind on loan payments to rural cooperative banks, citizens who haven’t paid their electricity bills, citizens who don’t have a functional lavatory at home and citizens who lack certain educational qualifications.

For that reason, the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding the law, “Rajbala and Others vs. the State of Haryana and Others,” is a landmark in conservative jurisprudence and a dangerous departure from the ideal of a participatory democracy.

And it paid off: India has had more than six decades of stable, elected governance.So why, then, would the Haryana legislature try to fix something that wasn’t broken? And it’s not just Haryana: Rajasthan, a much larger state, passed a bill with similar educational requirements last March.

More than simply a leftist to be opposed, Ocasio-Cortez has joined Barack Obama as a focus of the very same fear and anger that elected Trump in the first place. She represents the prospect of a more progressive, diverse America where those who were once deprived of power and influence can shape the course of the nation and its politics. The story of her family’s working-class roots in the Bronx is both specific enough to be compelling and universal enough for anyone, including many voters in Trump’s base, to relate to. And that’s precisely why her story, like Obama’s, must be discredited.

The idea that undeserving people of color are stealing money or recognition from the deserving  predates Trump, of course. It has been a feature of American politics since the country’s founding. The poetry of the young enslaved woman Phillis Wheatley was assumed to be fraudulent because her intelligence undermined the basic assumption of chattel slavery, that black people were not truly human. After Frederick Douglass wrote his first autobiography, a critic who knew one of Douglass’s owners insisted that the famed orator was “not capable of writing the Narrative” and that “there are no such barbarities committed on their plantations.”

More recently, the election of Barack Obama provoked a fierce backlash on the right, one that manifested in one conspiracy theory after another meant to prove Obama was a fraud. Conservatives became fixated on proving that the first black president did not write his autobiography, that he was functionally illiterate absent a teleprompter, and that his admission to elite universities was the unearned result of affirmative action, despite his graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law.

For at least 1500 years, the nation of Tibet has had a complex relationship with its large and powerful neighbor to the east, China. The political history of Tibet and China reveals that the relationship has not always been as one-sided as it now appears.

Indeed, as with China’s relations with the Mongols and the Japanese, the balance of power between China and Tibet has shifted back and forth over the centuries.

The first known interaction between the two states came in 640 A.D., when the Tibetan King Songtsan Gampo married the Princess Wencheng, a niece of the Tang Emperor Taizong. He also married a Nepalese princess.

The Great Game — also known as Bolshaya Igra — was an intense rivalry between the British and Russian Empires in Central Asia,

Britain sought to influence or control much of Central Asia to buffer the "crown jewel" of its empire: British India.

Russia, meanwhile, sought to expand its territory and sphere of influence, in order to create one of history's largest land-based empires.

In international relations (and history), a sphere of influence is a region within one country over which another country claims certain exclusive rights. 

The degree of control exerted by the foreign power depends on the amount of military force involved in the two countries' interactions, generally. 

Famous examples of spheres of influence in Asian history include the spheres established by the British and Russians in Persia (Iran) in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907

President Donald Trump made racially charged comments during a meeting on immigration with lawmakers on Thursday, asking why the U.S. admits people from “shithole countries” or “shitholes,” according to an eyewitness and two people familiar with the meeting. The White House did not deny that Trump made the remarks.

Certain Washington politicians choose to fight for foreign countries, but President Trump will always fight for the American people,” White House spokesperson Raj Shah said in a statement, adding a list of parameters the president believes should be part of any immigration agreement. Democrats were quick to pounce on the remarks, slamming Trump for what Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) described on Twitter as “abhorrent bigotry.”

“The president'(s) comments are unkind, divisive, elitist, and fly in the face of our nation’s values,” said Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah), whose parents immigrated to the United States from Haiti. “The president must apologize to both the American people and to the nations he so wantonly maligned.”

Consider two American children, one rich and one poor, both brilliant. The rich one is much more likely to become an inventor, creating products that help improve America’s quality of life. The poor child probably will not.

That’s the conclusion of a new study by the Equality of Opportunity project, a team of researchers led by the Stanford economist Raj Chetty. Chetty and his team look at who becomes inventors in the United States, a career path that can contribute to vast improvements in Americans’ standard of living. They find that children from families in the the top 1 percent of income distribution are 10 times as likely to have filed for a patent as those from below-median-income families, and that white children are three times as likely to have filed a patent as black children. This means, they say, that there could be millions of “lost Einsteins”—individuals who might have become inventors and changed the course of American life, had they grown up in different neighborhoods. “There are very large gaps in innovation by income, race, and gender,” Chetty told me. “These gaps don’t seem to be about differences in ability to innovate—they seem directly related to environment.”

Indeed, exposure to certain specific fields makes children more likely to pursue a career, and a patent, in those fields, the researchers found. This is how they know that exposure, in addition to neighborhoods, is important to innovation: It would be unlikely that growing up in a good neighborhood would inspire many children to patent in the same small field. People who grew up in Minneapolis, where there are many medical-device manufacturers, were especially likely to get patents in medical devices, for instance. Among people living in Boston as adults, those who grew up in Silicon Valley were especially likely to patent in computers. Children whose parents have patents in a specific field—say, antennas—are also likely to patent in exactly the same field as their parents did.

Between the 16th and 20th centuries, various European nations set out to conquer the world and take all of its wealth.

Rather than being colonized, Japan became an imperial power in its own right.

uncomfortable position between the French imperial possessions of French Indochina (now Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) to the east, and British Burma (now Myanmar) to the west

New York City’s reopening — a milestone longed for over the last 14 months — arrived at last on Wednesday. It was less a grand gala than a soft opening, a finish line at the end of a long race that no one wanted to be the first to cross.

Masks, no longer a hard requirement for the vaccinated in most situations, remained firmly in place by the majority of people, whether in the big-box stores and tiny boutiques of Manhattan or the shaded paths of Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

“It’s still store policy,” said Raj Lalbatchan, 23, a worker at Victoria, a store selling clothing in the Bronx. Nearby, Elisabeth Ocasio, 51, a server at the restaurant La Isla, said it is standing firm with the status quo. “We don’t know who’s vaccinated and who’s not,” she said. “We’re doing everything the same here.”

n fact, seeing men like Grayling continue to fail upwards is deeply traditional. Far from being an aberration, it is in keeping with the spirit of the political age: an aggressively misplaced nostalgia.

there is an aspect of Brexit and the calibre of its ascendant personnel that has always felt karmic. Grayling’s wildly overpromoted slapdashery is precisely the level of failure and incompetence you might have found in, say, the British Raj. Had he been born under earlier stars, you can absolutely see Chris dashing off a few catastrophic boundary changes for Louis Mountbatten, or ruining a province only to be rewarded with a bigger one. The difference is that we’ve brought it all home now. Having run out of other countries to do it to, Britain is now British empiring itself.

“And the first question this kid asked me is just … ‘What the heck does good masculinity look like?’”He grimaced.“And I’ll be honest with you: I did not have an answer for that.”

by 1958, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned that “the male role has plainly lost its rugged clarity of outline.” Writing in Esquire magazine, he added, “The ways by which American men affirm their masculinity are uncertain and obscure. There are multiplying signs, indeed, that something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.”

today’s problems are real and well documented. Deindustrialization, automation, free trade and peacetime have shifted the labor market dramatically, and not in men’s favor — the need for physical labor has declined, while soft skills and academic credentials are increasingly rewarded

The paper inspired him to write his influential 1996 book, “The Remedy,” which developed his theory that affirmative action had set back race relations by becoming a source of racial antagonism.

“If you want working-class white people to vote their race, there’s probably no better way to do it than to give explicitly racial preferences in deciding who gets ahead in life,” he said. “If you want working-class whites to vote their class, you would try to remind them that they have a lot in common with working-class Black and Hispanic people.”

Today, as in the mid-1990s, polls show that a majority of people oppose race-conscious college admissions, even as they support racial diversity. Public opinion may not always be right, Mr. Kahlenberg said, but surely it should be considered when developing public policy.