In a major relief to the poor amid this devastating Covid- 19 pandemic, Prime Minster Narendra Modi announced on Monday, 7th June, that the government has extended the PMGKAY scheme to distribute wheat and rice free of cost to about 80 crore people till November this year. Earlier in the month of April, the central […]
The catastrophic second wave of Covid-19 across India has posed the gravest challenge to the country since the Partition in terms of loss of human lives and a crisis too big to manage. These are testing times for people and for democracy as well. India claims its place in the list of greatest democracies in […]
My dear Baba, Most often, I start off my writings with the dictionary definition of a particular word, a word that’s the main theme of that particular piece I’m writing. So, today I would like to start off this letter by providing the Oxford Dictionary definition of the word “Gratitude”: the quality of being thankful; […]
How did Benjamin Netanyahu manage to serve as Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister? With a total of 15 years in office, Netanyahu surpassed the 12-year leadership of Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion. The answer to this question will become particularly critical for future Israeli leaders who hope to emulate Netanyahu’s legacy, now that his historic […]
We cannot survive a single day without the natural environment. It is the only thing that makes life possible and sustainable. Thus it is important that we take care of the ecosystem of the natural environment. Ecosystem restoration is the renewing of a degraded, damaged, or destroyed ecosystem through active human intervention. Restoration ecology emerged […]
The best way to spend a vacation is to go to the hills. When the plains get too hot to bear, we look to the hills for relief. Throughout the year we fantasise about the hills. Last week we chose to visit Chiranbal, a hill station in Kulgam district with the coordinates of 33°35’47″N & […]
The last few weeks in Kashmir have been thick with rumours and conspiracy theories due to a perception of heightened deployment of security forces in the valley, which has brought back memories of the events that preceded the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution in August 2019. There are now rumours […]
The drastic changes in environmental conditions would surely lead to extinction of a large number of species in a short course of time. Extinction of species is not something new. It has been happening since species came into being. The extinction of old species paves way for new species, a process called Speciation. The new […]
The story mentioned in Surah al-Fil (The Elephant) can be dismissed as myth or understood as history, if the poetry of that period is taken into account The text of the Quran mentions a number of historical incidents about different nations and peoples. There are reflections on what happened to different peoples and nations at […]
Modern man has lost his deep soul due to the unilateral focus on rationalism, which causes dreadful neurosis and existential crisis Dostoyevsky in the west started warning against rational utopianism – converting a human being into a sort of piano key, a computer, a robot – when in fact there were deep “irrationalities” and “supra […]