The Durban climate talks finally ended more than 36 hours after the scheduled closure on Sunday early morning. The world agreed to a new global climate change regime that will come in to force starting 2020. India took over centre-stage as a force to reckon with, regained its position as the leader and moral voice of the developing world as the EU and the US were forced to address its...

In 2004, a boy was crushed to death by a vehicle when he was crossing the road in front of a school to fetch water. The school, in the heart of the nation’s capital, did not have drinking water facilities. Seven years later, courtesy the NGO Environmental and Consumer Protection Foundation and the Supreme Court, all Indian states (the last two being Uttar Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir) have given...

Eminent neurologist says kids should not be robbed of their right to grow in a natural way by “restricting [their] learning competence” with education in a foreign language like English An award-winning Jaipur-based neurologist has advocated imparting primary education to children in their mother-tongue, saying it would produce youngsters possessing “fundamentally strong personalities” bestowed with wisdom, motivation, better communication skills and creativity. In his new study, Dr. Ashok Panagariya – honoured with...

A.K. Ramanujan, while referring to the diversity and apparently contradictory element of unity in the Indian traditions, refers to an Irish joke about whether to classify trousers as singular or plural: singular from the top, plural from the bottom.1 A Concurrent Discipline Course in the University of Delhi for Second Year Honours students not doing History was introduced in 2005 on ‘Culture in India—Ancient’, and had sought to very sensitively...

Social anthropologists have long used the technique of learning tribal languages and adopting tribal customs to understand tribal peoples. There’s a new class of sociology students in Chhattisgarh now — the police. Bastar police are studying tribal behaviour to recoup what they think is lost in the linguistic and cultural gap with the local population. The problems of communication, the police believe, lead to suspicion and miscommunication, and push local people...