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The mountains don't care about borders. It's time we acted like it

By Dr. Jayant Kumar When the flood came, the sky was clear. That is the cruel paradox of the Himalayas. A glacier collapses. A landslide dams a river, then releases it in a wall of water. An avalanche crashes into a lake and sends a surge racing downstream. There is no storm to warn you. There is only sudden, roaring destruction—crossing borders in minutes, indifferent to the lines humans have drawn on maps.

Nepal's deadliest flood exposed extreme fragility of high-altitude Himalayan ecosystem

By Madhab Pant* At roughly 8:30 AM on 26 August 2026, a wall of water, mud, ice, and massive boulders roared down the Lhende Khola into the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli river systems. The surge struck without local rainfall or warning sirens, catching border communities like Timure, mid-morning. Initial reports mistook the ground tremors for an earthquake, but satellite and seismic data later confirmed the real trigger: a high-altitude collapse of rock and ice near Langtang Lirung, on the Tibetan side, spanning nearly one square kilometer and generating a ground shock equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 quake.

'I Am Malala': Reflections on a silent reading, when youth refuse to be silenced

By Fr. Cedric Prakash SJ* I am Malala: I was born on 12 July 1997 as Malala Yousafzai in the Swat District of Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. My family was lower-middle-class. It was certainly not easy to make both ends meet. My father was an educationist and ran a girls' school in my village; my mother was a housewife. We are three children: I have two younger brothers. The fact is that my parents did not have enough money for a hospital birth for me, so my mother had to give birth to me at home with the help of neighbours. My name 'Malala' means 'grief-stricken', after Malalai of Maiwand, a famous Pashtun poet and warrior woman from southern Afghanistan.

Bhagalpur Dialogue calls for Farakka decommissioning, equitable Ganga water sharing

By Kumar Krishnan* The demand to dismantle the Farakka Barrage has returned to the centre of a wider debate over the future of the Ganga, but activists gathered in Bhagalpur over the weekend made an important distinction: removing Farakka, they said, should not mean ending the sharing of Ganga waters with Bangladesh. The two-day national public dialogue, organised by the Ganga Mukti Andolan on August 29 and 30 in Bhagalpur, brought together river activists, environmentalists, social workers and representatives of river-dependent communities from Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand. Several senior activists also joined the discussions online.

Modi, political personality cults, and the historical precedent of divine claims

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak* Recent reports indicate that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is being worshipped at several locations across India, both within existing temples and at new sites. A "Modi Mandir" is reportedly under consideration in Patna, Bihar. These developments raise important questions about the intersection of political leadership and religious devotion in contemporary India, and they invite comparison with historical precedents in which political leaders have claimed divine sanction or encouraged veneration.

Bhagwat's Madison Square mirage: Preach peace in New York, spread hate in India

By Syed Ali Mujtaba When the chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) takes the stage at Madison Square Garden in New York, the world listens. The venue, the audience, the oratory—it is a production designed for a global audience. But when Mohan Bhagwat spoke on August 30, 2026, his message of "unity in diversity" rang hollow. At a time when the persecution of Muslims in India has become a global headline,