By Harsh Thakor*  Raghu Rai, hailed as the “father of Indian photojournalism,” passed away at the age of 83 at a New Delhi hospital after battling cancer that had spread to his brain. His career, spanning over half a century, chronicled indelible images of India’s political leaders, spiritual icons, and everyday life. Rai’s family confirmed his death and announced that his funeral would take place at Lodhi Crematorium, marking the end of an era in Indian visual culture. Rai spent more than six decades focusing his lens on the subcontinent’s joys, tragedies, and contradictions with an intensity few could match. He was the man who defined Indian photojournalism for half a century, whose pictures often conveyed more than a thousand words ever could, especially his classic images of Indira Gandhi. Raghu Rai did not merely photograph India; he explored and analysed it with patience, rigour and empathy. His camera traversed power, poverty, faith, tragedy, politics, streets, s...

By Shamsul Islam  "What is now happening to Marx's theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the "consolation" of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it." [ Lenin in State and Revolution , 1917]

By A Representative   On the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster , the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) has demanded an immediate moratorium on all new nuclear fission-based power plants in India and a time-bound, planned phaseout of nuclear energy worldwide, warning that the “ nuclear-industrial-military complex ” continues to threaten humanity’s very existence.

By Mohd. Ziyaullah Khan*  Amid growing political debate over delimitation and constitutional amendments, one structural fact often gets overlooked: the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) cannot pass a constitutional amendment on its own. Under India’s Constitution , such an amendment requires a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Parliament. In the Lok Sabha , where the NDA holds around 293 seats, it falls significantly short of the required 362. In the Rajya Sabha , with roughly 134–140 seats, it still needs an additional 15–25 members to cross the threshold. This gap is not merely numerical; it represents a constitutional veto in the hands of the opposition.  

By Ravi Ranjan*  Badri Narayan 's Hindi poem " Duḥkha-Purāṇa " (The Sorrowful Chronicle) achieves something rare in contemporary poetry: it transforms the seemingly simple experience of "being left behind" into a profound meditation on human exclusion . Through images of birds breaking from their flock, a calf separated from the herd, a deer failing to rejoin its group, and finally a person stranded on a shore as a boat disappears into deepening dusk, the poem builds what scholar Ravi Ranjan calls a " multilayered metaphor for exclusion ." Unlike traditional puranas that celebrate gods, kings, and victors, Narayan proposes a counter-narrative—a chronicle of those continuously dispossessed from community, association, and development.

By Harsh Thakor*  Selecting the best teams in Test cricket history is a deeply subjective venture. In this feature, I have ranked the finest sides in order of merit, attempting to strike a balance between statistical achievements and the sheer strength or talent within a squad.