Every year, the foreign ministers of the 11 countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) get together to talk regional business.

These meetings tend to attract some big names from outside the region, too. At this year’s meeting this week in Manila, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will all attend.

Each power has its own reason to be there. The US wants to stay visible in a region that China has been courting. China wants to reassure its neighbours who are worried about its behaviour in the South China Sea, where run-ins with Philippine boats are now almost routine. And Russia wants to show it still has a seat at the table in the Asia-Pacific as its war in Ukraine grinds on.

Tellingly, Rubio and Lavrov have no plans to meet each other. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, will also be in Manila, but no meetings with Rubio have been announced.

As in years past, one notable ASEAN diplomat has not been invited: Myanmar’s foreign minister....

On July 19, a small group of Indian students in Berlin held a demonstration at the iconic Brandenburg Gate to protest against the mismanagement of the NEET-UG examination for seats in medical colleges in their home country.

Since then, protests have been held in other German cities such as Stuttgart and Frankfurt.

The students say their agitation against the leak of the test paper is also an attempt to draw attention to the rising authoritarianism in their home country.

“We are fighting the regime,” said Avni G, a protester in Berlin. “We are peaceful protesters. But we want to raise bigger questions – from paper leak to the atrocities of the government, their fascist agenda.”

This week, there have been at least four demonstrations in Berlin at tourist-friendly public landmarks such as Alexanderplatz. The protestors say that they aim to ensure that they are visible to passers-by even as they are careful not to disrupt life but to ensure.

On July 21, demonstrators also gathered in front of the Indian Embassy in Berlin standing in solidarity with the students in India. They read out poetry and held up placards. “Educate, Agitate, Organise”, said one, echoing BR Ambedkar’s advice. Another said, “Hum Dekhenge”, the title of the stirring poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz about fighting oppression....

Ann Patchett’s Whistler opens with its protagonist, 53-year-old Daphne Zabriskie, running into her former stepfather on a random Friday. It’s a loaded encounter. Daphne bursts into tears, and Eddie Triplett – the stepfather in question – decides he needs a drink before noon. But it means that over 40 years later, their lives are connected again – a reality that they spend the rest of the time settling into.

Eddie is one of three fathers to Daphne and her sister, Leda: their late biological father left them to live on his sailboat full-time, and their mother’s current husband is cordial but has a family of his own. Eddie is the brief but joyous interlude between those two. Joyous, because he was deeply involved in parenting the girls (who were then nine and seven, and lived with him), and brief, because their mother divorced him and forbade any contact after he and Daphne nearly died in a car accident.

The past is a room

To talk about such a story, let us first address what it is not. As much as Whistler deals with wounds, it is not a tale of “healing”, which is to say, the characters do not wish to explain their experiences, and they do not describe their fractured backgrounds as things to pity or improve on – a belief which can translate to cloying sentimentality, or its worse cousin, therapy-speak. (This would’ve been easy to include, considering Leda is a therapist; and so we must be doubly grateful for its omission.)...

In his third collection of poems, Ode to a Grieving Angel, poet Naveen Kishore returns as a theatre-lighting designer, his poems a witness to the artistic process.

A purgatory of suffering

The first section, also the longest, unfurls on the stage with the poet witnessing the play of light and shadow from the wings. Like the actors, the reader too is caught in the “glare of spotlights” while Shakespeare’s iconic plays are performed in a rather grotesque manner. The darkness of the shadows is juxtaposed with a “barren” stage and colourless trees, the actors a zombie version of themselves. Characters from Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear find themselves together on the same stage, jostling for space, tripping over wires, and burning in fading light. The audience has disappeared into the dark and the actors are a heap of anxiety and confusion. For Kishore, Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines are pitiful – with a limited vocabulary and appearances, they are doomed to repeat their fates over and over again. Unlike the audience, they may not exit into the light. Not yet. The stage, despite its careful choreography, is a purgatory of suffering....

At around midnight on July 23, Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted an Instagram reel, in which he acknowledged that the problem of paper leaks was a “very painful” one for lakhs of students.

Modi said that the government had taken many steps to tackle the problem, including putting guilty individuals in jail, and swiftly conducting a retest to ensure that students did not lose a year. He also noted that the government would establish a fast-track court to hear the cases involving paper leaks. These courts, he had said earlier that day on X, would “ensure swift and stringent punishments” for those responsible for the leaks of exam papers.

The prime minister’s response has not dampened the protests that continue to rage on across the country.

In fact, his assurance of quick trials in the paper leak cases has raised questions about the progress that has been made in earlier cases, such as connected to the 2024 leak of the NEET paper.

Many were sceptical, not least because the same day, the Central Bureau of Investigation had cleared the name of a key accused in that case, Sanjeev Mukhiya, stating that it had not found evidence against him....

In the late 1830s, in north India, the artist and writer Emily Eden was fascinated by Sikhs – both royalty and commoners. She visited Sikh religious sites and experienced the hospitality of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

Emily and her younger sister Frances (Fanny) accompanied their brother George, Lord Auckland, India’s newly appointed governor-general, on his progress across north India, from October 1837 to December 1838. Occasional mentions of Sikhs continue to appear in her correspondence till at least November 1839.

When Lord Auckland and his sisters met Ranjit Singh in December 1838, they probably knew little of the Sikhs’ distinctive religious and martial heritage.

Luckily there were interpreters, and Emily had a sharp intellect, acute powers of observation, liberal Whig values and a lively curiosity about people. She also had a keen sense of humour. She journalled and painted assiduously and prolifically.

Among nineteenth-century Western sources on Sikh history, historians have usually drawn on the more formal accounts published by male authors. The journals and letters of women, as well as their sketches and paintings, have been largely overlooked. So, consideration is overdue of Emily Eden’s insights into interactions between Sikhs and the British a decade before their annexation of Punjab....

Edited by Dhrubo Jyoti and Dhamini Ratnam, Queer India Now holds the fraught, diverse, difficult, hopeful, rebellious and relentless lifework that queer and trans persons have been practising and embodying for decades. It rightly places itself in a long legacy of queer writing in India while revealing the material stakes of what constitutes living a queer life much more than most edited volumes that have been published before. This is not to say that previous volumes do not reveal material precarity but that, with Queer India Now, the contributions make visible a clear departure from exploring queerness only as this amorphous, liminal mode of being – to one where language, positionality, region and infrastructures of living are mapped between these two words “Queer” and “India”.

The citizen and the state

In other words, the messiness and differences across the pages represent robustly the plurality of what becomes “a movement” and its unevenness holds the many threads that negotiations with institutions involved. There is queerness that wrestles its way out of violent families, surveilling legal and medical systems and then there is also that which has one foot in the system, struggling to find the key to the lock. As the Introduction states, “Neatness is not always a friend of democracy”, and especially in the wake of the recently passed Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act (2026), this shadowy idea called “democracy” is consistently made and unmade between the hands of citizens and the State....

In one of the early chapters of his latest book, Open Intelligence: Education Between Art and Artificial, Saikat Majumdar establishes his thesis argument: Art and artifice shape each other, and hence, in the end, remain inseparable. He further responds to the age-old debatable question of whether creative arts can be taught with distinguished clarity. Majumdar elucidates that “all art has a dimension that is more like science…art forms with more visible scientific patterns have more teachable components…It has been easy for AI to pick up the scientific, learnable patterns and technical foundations of all art forms.”

This structured argument clarifies that creative arts indeed can be taught to some extent, and contradictorily, it is this teachable component that has been easily and effectively acquired by AI. This, however, leads us back to square one – what is the worth of “teaching” creative writing to humans if those teachable components can be learned by AI? What is the unique distinction, then, between the human student of creative arts and the AI student of creative arts?...

Every democracy has two arenas of politics. One is formal: legislatures, courts, committees, elections and party offices. The other is informal – streets, campuses, public meetings and citizens’ movements. The health of a democracy depends on the relationship between these two spaces.

In a functioning republic, parliament absorbs public anxieties and converts them into debate, legislation and accountability. Movements outside parliament push institutions when they become complacent. The two are part of the same democratic ecosystem.

India’s present crisis lies in the weakening of that relationship.

Social scientist and activist Yogendra Yadav recently argued that the Opposition must stop viewing elections as the beginning and end of politics and rediscover the tradition of democratic resistance. It is an argument with deep roots in Indian political history.

The freedom movement was not a parliamentary exercise. The movements against the Emergency were not conducted through legislative procedure. Many of India’s most significant democratic gains came when citizens stepped outside formal institutions and demanded that those institutions live up to their constitutional promises....

For many people living with obesity, newer weight-loss medicines such as Wegovy and Mounjaro have been transformative. These drugs are often grouped under the label GLP-1 medicines because they mimic hormones released after eating, helping people feel fuller and less hungry. Mounjaro, whose active ingredient is tirzepatide, also acts on another hormone involved in appetite and blood sugar control.

At a time when more than 1 billion people worldwide are living with obesity, these medicines are widely viewed as among the biggest advances in obesity treatment. But one important question is becoming harder to avoid: what happens when people stop taking them?

Evidence points to an uncomfortable answer. Many people regain a significant amount of the weight they have lost. A recent study found that, after people stopped weight-loss medications, weight and several heart health markers tended to move back towards pre-treatment levels over time. Other studies have found similar patterns after stopping semaglutide and tirzepatide....

A week is a long time in politics. This week, the aphorism has come alive in India.

It began with Delhi Police swooping down on Jantar Mantar on Saturday morning to ferret away activist Sonam Wangchuk. He was on the 20th day of his hunger strike in support of the Cockroach Janta Party’s demand for the resignation of education minister Dharmendra Pradhan for a series of exam paper leaks.

His abduction incensed those already sympathetic to the protest. A crowd of hundreds swelled up to thousands as young people living far away from Delhi took buses and trains to show up for a protest march to Parliament on Monday.

For the first time since Narendra Modi became prime minister, protesters reached the doorstep of Parliament. The police used lathis, teargas, even pellet guns. But instead of instilling fear, the crackdown further loosened its hold.

Since then, Central Delhi has turned into a carnival of protest. The government has closed down metro stations and shut down the internet. But it has not been able to stop the human tide in the heart of the national capital....

Amidst a rise in electricity demand driven by warmer conditions in June, hydropower generation has declined, increasing India’s reliance on coal-fired power. The trend could intensify if El Niño conditions strengthen during the southwest monsoon.

An analysis published by S&P Global, an energy market intelligence firm, on July 3 said that India’s average hydropower generation in June declined by 6.3 aGW (average gigawatt) from a year earlier, even as average electricity demand increased by 24.3 aGW. The shortfall was largely offset by a 20.7 aGW increase in coal-fired generation, while solar and wind generation rose by a combined 9.4 aGW.

The trend is not confined to India.

According to the S&P Global analysis, Japan, South Korea, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Malaysia have also witnessed lower hydropower generation. However, India and Vietnam together accounted for nearly 80% of the regional decline in hydropower generation, making them the most affected countries in Asia.

“The June decline (in hydropower generation) is consistent with the expected impact of El Niño on rainfall patterns and reservoir inflows across Asia,” the analysis said and added that hydropower generation could remain below normal if El Niño conditions persist through the summer months....

A time-lapse video of a moulting cicada showed the creature attaching itself to a vertical surface. It seemed to quiver endlessly before at last breaking open along the back of its body. Another being, a transparent phantom, emerged from the shell.

The imago. A sexually mature adult, the fifth and final instar of the cicada life cycle. The imago grew under its old skin. In this new form, it had red eyes. Its wings were crumpled, wet. Rocking back and forth, it found its way free. In this ritual of becoming, nothing could be rushed. The wings filled with air, opening as the wetness that weighed them down evaporated.

The cicada laboured for more than an hour to birth its new body. The video that we were watching condensed it into five minutes. Even then, the girls grew impatient. The sight of the insect rising from itself was boring – they wished someone would help it out and didn’t understand when I said it was wrong to interfere. Unaccustomed to watching exertion, they moved away to do other things....

Mushroom millets with cashew-beer butter

Cooking time: 1 hour 30 mins, serves 2-3

Earthy mushrooms paired with hearty foxtail millets and brought together by a smooth, nutty cashew-beer butter.

Ingredients

For cashew-beer butter

• 70 g cashew nuts

• 75 ml beer

• ½ tsp date syrup/honey

• ½ tsp Dijon mustard

• 70 ml sunflower oil

For millets and mushrooms

• 110 g foxtail millets

• 1½ tsp olive oil

• 1 onion, medium, finely chopped

• 1 garlic clove, large, crushed

• 120 g brown shimeji mushrooms, cut into 1-cm slices

• 120 g oyster mushrooms, cut into 1-cm slices

• 2 tsp rice vinegar

• 2 tsp mirin

• 2½ tsp light soy sauce

• 15 g chives, finely chopped

Method

• To make the cashew-beer butter, in a small food processor jar, blitz the cashews until finely ground. Add the beer, Dijon mustard, and honey and process until a fine paste is formed. Gradually stream in the sunflower oil until the mixture is smooth and emulsified. Set aside.

• To make the millets, in a pressure cooker, combine the foxtail millets with 2.5 times their volume of water. Cook for three whistles, then set aside so that the pressure releases naturally.

• To make the mushrooms, in a pan, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and a pinch of salt, and sauté until translucent. Add the crushed garlic and sauté for another 30 seconds until fragrant. Add both types of sliced mushrooms and sauté until they have released their moisture and begun to brown.

• Once the mushrooms are done, add the foxtail millets, rice vinegar, mirin, and light soy sauce to the pan. Stir until everything is well combined and heated through.

• To serve, put the millet and mushroom mixture on a plate. Top with a dollop of the cashew-beer butter.

...

The spectre of climate change is upon us and its manifestations are there for all to see.

The public debate about climate change tends to focus on its more visible effects for adaptive (and not preventive) measures: increased frequency and intensity of heat waves, urban flooding and air pollution. However, many of the embedded sources of environmental harm remain unacknowledged. As a rapidly urbanising country, one such source that India can no longer ignore is carbon emissions emerging from its growing built environment.

Every building carries a carbon cost that far outlasts those who built it. Globally, the built environment accounts for nearly 34% of annual CO₂ emissions, the single largest share of any sector. In India, the buildings sector contributes a substantial and growing share of national greenhouse gas emissions.

Currently, the dominant discourse tends to focus mostly on “operational carbon” – the emissions from running a building, with the discussion confined to energy efficiency. What tends to be ignored is “embodied carbon” – the carbon emitted in the making of a building, from the extraction and production of materials to their transportation and construction on site....

Today is the 26th of Jaisthya of the Bengali year 1306. I took a rest at Joshimath today. From here I had to make all preparations to go to Tibet. I will get up tomorrow morning and proceed towards Kailash and Manas Sarovar.

Tomorrow’s sunrise will help me in my journey; tomorrow’s cool breeze will stimulate my heart and mind and give me the leisure to reach the foot of Kailashpati – Lord Kailash. These thoughts didn’t let me sleep at night. I only sat waiting for dawn to arrive. Then, before the early morning sun rose high in the sky, I got up, completed my ablutions, and woke up my companions.

The royal path, which I mentioned earlier, would take us up to Niti, located at the border of the British state. From there the Tibetan territory began. The royal path went along the valley of the Dhauliganga, which originated in Tibet.

We left Joshimath a little before dawn and began to walk along the path. Approximately around noon, we reached a village called “Dhak”, which was at a distance of six miles from Joshimath. The road to Niti went eastwards through this village. The Dhauliganga also flowed below Dhak. After Dhak, there are no proper villages on the path for the next four-five days of travelling. So, we had to take a rest here and stock up on our food supplies. ...

On Thursday night, educator and environmental activist Sonam Wangchuk ended the hunger strike he had started more than three weeks ago in Delhi. He is well-known for peaceful protests, some of them fasts, demanding statehood for Ladakh and drawing attention to the ecological fragility of the Himalaya.

This time, though, the issue was different.

In May, the question paper for the NEET-UG, the national entrance exam for medical school, leaked. In June, more than two million students were made to redo the exam – one of the largest examination frauds in recent memory.

Wangchuk began fasting in solidarity with members of the Cockroach Janata Party, a youth movement only weeks old but already nationally known. They were demanding Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, accountability for the leak and an overhaul of the entrance examination system itself.

India did not invent going hungry in protest, but it has clearly made the method its own. One could even fashion an alternative history of the Republic based on its major fasts – not just of marginal protests but some of the most significant confrontations between the Indian state and people....

When Donald Trump returned to the White House, he promised to avoid another Middle Eastern “forever war”. After the costly experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan, that pledge resonated with an American public weary of prolonged military intervention.

For a brief moment, it appeared that this promise might be realised. The memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed by the US and Iran on June 17 seemed to offer a pathway away from escalating confrontation. Markets stabilised, regional tensions eased and there was cautious optimism that Washington and Tehran had stepped back from the brink.

That optimism has proved remarkably but unsurprisingly short-lived. US military strikes have resumed and Iran has retaliated against American and its allies across the Gulf. Iran’s proxy allies, the Houthis, have declared themselves ready to close the Red Sea chokepoint at the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which has provided an alternative transit route for some oil exports, particularly from Saudi Arabia.

Washington continues to combine military pressure with calls for renewed negotiations. But rather than representing the collapse of an isolated peace initiative, these developments may confirm the reality of grey zone conflict – where diplomacy manages war rather than ends it....

Government doctors at Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital have noted that 26 small, round wounds sustained by a journalist covering the students’ protests on Monday are “consistent with pellets striking” the right side of his body “at an oblique angle”.

The medical records of the journalist from Outlook magazine who was admitted to the hospital on July 21 offer the clearest evidence so far for the use of pellet guns during the youth protests in the national capital on Monday.

Delhi Police has denied that its forces used pellet guns on protestors.

Medical records from Safdarjung Hospital show that the journalist with Outlook magazine was hit by dozens of small metal pellets during the students' protest on July 20.

The records, seen by Scroll, add fresh evidence against Delhi Police’s repeated denial that its forces used pellet guns on protesters.

Scroll sent questions to the Delhi Police and the Central Reserve Police Force, asking if pellet guns were used on students. The story will be updated if they respond....

At Posto Dallas, a fuel station in northern Brazil’s Belém city, a car pulls in. The driver checks the price board, then picks a fuel. The 27-year-old station attendant, John, sees this happen all day. “Mostly flex-fuel vehicles come here,” he said. “People see the price and ask us to fill the fuel in their tanks accordingly.”

Posto Dallas fuel stations are supplied by the state-owned energy company Petrobras and operate under the brand. In Brazil, customers can choose between different percentages of ethanol blends or pure petrol depending on the price and usage. Most cars sold here are flex-fuel vehicles, built to run on different petrol-ethanol blends. Brazil has offered this choice for decades.

In another part of the world, nearly 15,000 km away, at a petrol pump in Bhopal’s Katara Hills, the scene looks similar. Vehicles come and go, attendants fill tanks, customers decide fast. But one thing is different: the choice on offer. In India, the government made 20% ethanol blended petrol, called E20, the default fuel across all fuel stations under its ethanol blending programme....

I was ready at 5 pm. No hair oil. Focused on talcum powder. Nirmala brought out a small bottle of scent she had borrowed from a friend and sprayed generously around my neck. A sweet smell enveloped us, transporting me instantly to a distant dreamland. Everything was perfect.

“Athige!” Nirmala poked my arm and giggled, cupping her mouth.

Athe brought a fresh string of jasmine from the neighbour’s house and pinned it to my hair.

“Athige, you look like a film heroine.” She winked, and we both laughed when we saw Vishnu enter.

“Oh, you are ready.” He ran his eyes over me and pinched his nose as if to indicate the scent filling the room. “I will come in ten minutes. Let me freshen up,” he said, disappearing into the bathroom.

He came out exactly ten minutes later.

“Shall we go?” He asked after running a comb through his hair. I nodded, and we walked out of the door as if we had done this a dozen times before. I waved at Nirmala. Athe smiled, gave a head nod of approval, and I followed him out as his wife, feeling the Bangalore breeze on my face for the first time in days....

A young monk decided, “To keep peace, I’ll agree with everyone.”

First, a villager said, “Tea is better than meditation.”

The monk nodded, “Yes, absolutely.”

Another said, “Meditation is better than tea.”

The monk nodded again, “Yes, absolutely.”

Soon, two villagers argued: “Life is suffering!”

“No, life is joy!”

Both turned to the monk. He smiled, “Yes, absolutely.”

Finally, the Zen master asked, “Is agreeing with everyone the path to peace?”

The monk grinned, “Yes, absolutely.”

The master laughed, “Then you’ve agreed to nonsense. Peace is not in saying yes – it lies in knowing when to say no without anger.”

Blind agreement does not create peace – it creates confusion (and really bad tea debates).

Oh, to live in a world where “peace” is just a polite nod and a murmured “I agree!” If only maintaining harmonious relationships were as simple as perfecting the art of the agreeable sigh. But alas, dear reader, life – and genuine human connection – is far more nuanced and considerably less quiet than that....

Welcome to The India Fix by Shoaib Daniyal. A newsletter on Indian politics.

As always, if you’ve been sent this newsletter and like it, to get it in your inbox every week, sign up here (click on “follow”).

On a wall close to the Jantar Mantar, an eighteenth-century observatory in the heart of New Delhi, are scribbled the words “Vote Chor Modi”. The Hindi phrase, calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi a vote thief, refers to the frequent allegations of election rigging made against the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The graffiti was made by students protesting against question paper leaks. For weeks now, hundreds of young men and women have gathered at the heart of India’s capital to demand the resignation of the Union minister for education. Rather than talk to the students, on Saturday the Modi government sent in the police to forcibly detain Sonam Wangchuk, an activist fasting on behalf of the students.

This show of force was the political equivalent of taking a cricket bat to a wasp nest. On Monday, students, likely numbering above a lakh, hit the streets trying to march to Parliament. While the police blocked them before they could reach the legislature, the sheer size of the crowd meant that they took over Lutyen’s Delhi, the heart of the Indian state. It was a sight never seen before....

In this chapter, I will argue that this ability suggests that myth is an inherently comparative genre, in a double sense: it both compares and is amenable to comparison. I have also argued that myths may use microscopes and telescopes to link daily reality with global – indeed, galaxial – politics; that some myths open up our political vision just as other myths open up our theological vision, when juxtaposed with the events of our lives. I also suggested that political and theological texts act as lenses for one another. Now I argue that the comparison of myths from other cultures opens up our political vision. I vertically linked the cosmic and the banal within any single myth; the cross-cultural agenda I consider now looks sideways, constructing links between different tellings of myths in different cultures. My introduction argued for the uses of metaphor; this chapter and the next use three metaphors from the animal world – dark cats, barking dogs, and implied spiders – to advance the argument for comparison....

On Monday, social media was filled with images of the march to Parliament called by the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign. The Delhi Police said it had not given permission for the march. Some participants crossed barricades and allegedly threw stones.

The police and Rapid Action Force appear to be responding with disproportionate force. Videos show the men in uniform firing tear gas and raining baton blows upon protesters, many of whom were retreating, surrounded by the police and visibly not attacking anyone. These accounts require verification, but the imbalance is apparent.

In the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Chief Justice Surya Kant refused to urgently hear a petition alleging that the police had used excessive force against protesters. “Don’t waste our time and don’t waste your time,” Live Law quoted Chief Justice Surya Kant as saying.

The lawyer who sought that the plea be listed for hearing on Thursday told the court that he could present video evidence of the police excesses. However, Live Law quoted Justice Kant as saying, “We don’t have time to watch.”...

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

At the end of every year, Spotify Wrapped takes over social media feeds, with users showing off the annual recap of their top music choices. Lately, these reviews have taken on a more international flavor – packed with K-pop and Latino rhythms that mirror the platform’s explosive overseas expansion and increasingly diverse artist catalog.

Launched in 2008, Spotify today has about 761 million users, including 293 million subscribers, in 184 markets. Brazilian funk, K-pop, Afrobeats, and Urban Latino are among its fastest-growing genres, and last year, songs in 16 languages reached its global top 50, Gustav Gyllenhammar, senior vice president of markets and subscriptions, told Rest of World.

Most artists see more than half their royalties coming from streams outside their home country, even as the company grapples with the challenges – and opportunities – of artificial intelligence, he said....

On July 20, hours after students marching to Parliament were beaten up by the police in Delhi, Mumbai student Preeti Kamble headed to Shivaji Park in the heart of the island city.

Kamble, who recently passed her Class 12 exams and is preparing to join college, wanted to demonstrate her solidarity with other students. “A close friend of mine is preparing for the NEET exam,” she said, referring to the national-level medical entrance test.

The Cockroach Janta Party-led protest in Delhi is demanding that Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resign for mishandling the national NEET-UG exam for seats in medical colleges.

Kamble explained: “Her parents have put their entire savings into her education. I decided to show up at the protest site so I could do my bit to ensure she does not face what other NEET students did.”

But Kamble was detained by the police even before she could reach the protest site or shout any slogans.

She was taken to the Kalachowkie police station, in the south-eastern part of the city. “They took my name, phone number and address and let me go,” Kamble said....

In 1994, a US company and the United States Department of Agriculture secured a European patent for a method of using neem extracts to control fungi. The neem tree, however, was not a discovery.

Across the Indian subcontinent, it had long been used in traditional medicine, agriculture, and furniture making, with its pesticidal properties documented in Sanskrit texts and embedded in everyday agricultural practice.

After a six-year legal challenge led by an Indian organisation named the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology, supported by international allies, the patent was revoked in 2000. Five years after that, the decision was upheld on appeal, with the board ruling that the method lacked novelty and an inventive step, given its long-documented use in India.

Now, three decades later, the neem case looks less like an aberration than a template. The frontier has moved from isolated plant compounds to the systems-level ecological knowledge that smallholder and Adivasi communities have developed over generations. ...

Let me introduce myself. They call me Hassan, sometimes they call me Madrassi, and sometimes I think of myself as a Hyderabadi. Each name is as good as the other, and each one a lie. Hassan was the Caliph that was and was not, Madras is long gone and Hyderabad was never really my city, only the city I ran away from.

It was my father’s choice, my naming. Maybe my mother had a hand in it as well, but I knew his reasons better. He ran from the Hindu faith of his forefathers into the lap of Communism, and then ran farther still into the poetic lamentations of the Shia wailing their distress of “O Hassan! O Hussain!” as they lamented a world where power could overwhelm justice, where the arguments of saints could not turn aside an arrow or a blade, could not even provide a cup of water to the grandson of the Prophet himself.

It was my father, in love with defeats, who would burn that name into me, who would regale me with his useless histories of poets. And in the end, maybe that is what set me on this road to Lucknow. ...