Many rulers and architects have left behind their imprint on the historic Indian city of Delhi over the centuries. While a Mughal king’s artisans built an impressive Shahjahanabad in Old Delhi, the English architect Edward Lutyen’s legacy is the sprawling ‘Imperial’ New Delhi at the height of British Raj. In 1952, the American architect Joseph Allen Stein arrived in the newly Independent India from California and gave a refreshing, modern and international idiom to the Capital city’s architecture. Born...

Who would be the next Prime Minister of India where the General Elections are due in 2014? Indian leaders, ‘public intellectuals’ and the media are showing little interest in this subject as the national electoral exercise in the world’s largest democracy is still two years away. But is this a hypothetical question? However, it is important to note that strong signals have already begun to come from the USA and China indicating that Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of the western state of...

The attack on Israeli diplomat Tal Yehoshua Koren in New Delhi seems to be part of larger terror plan. According to the Indian police, the conspiracy was hatched for over a year before the first strike on the Israeli diplomat on February 13, reports The Times of India. Police claim the conspirators have been identified, including the bomber who fled India the next day and is now holed up in Malaysia. “Intelligence agencies are trying to ascertain whether the bombing was planned by an Iran-based...

Challenges that the internet poses to health, economic and social well-being of people, especially the young, is becoming a major topic of concern worldwide. The first internet addiction rehab clinic in the United States of America, reStart, has opened in the state of Washington. The clinic works mainly with young adults who have lost control of their internet, gaming, pornography or social media usage, reports Al Jazeera. “According to psychologists at the clinic, the treatment focuses on...

Tal Yehoshua Koren, 40, the Israeli diplomat’s wife who suffered spine and liver injuries in Monday’s bomb attack in New Delhi, today left for her country after she was discharged from a hospital in India’s capital city. (Meanwhile Israel’s Counter Terrorism Bureau has warned of additional attempts to hurt Israelis worldwide, following the recent attacks in Thailand, Georgia and India. A senior official in the bureau urged Israelis who are currently overseas to be extra...

Pakistan’s former ISI chief General Ziauddin Khawaja, also known as Ziauddin Butt (head of the ISI, 1997-1999), claims that then President Pervez Musharraf knew about Osama bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. Even if this news is true, it is not shocking. What the world would be eager to know is whether the then American President George W. Bush, the CIA and the Pentagon were in the know about this ugly fact. President Pervez Musharraf was not only the favourite of President Bush and...

India’s security agencies are worried. Initial investigations have revealed that the modus operandi employed by the person who attacked Israeli embassy staff in New Delhi – by fixing bomb to a car – “mirrored the method used by Mossad earlier to assassinate Iranian scientists.” (Meanwhile, the Israeli diplomat’s wife who was in the car when the explosion took place in New Delhi on Monday is still critical. Tal Yehoshua-Koren, 40, was on her way to pick up her...

The attack on Israeli embassy staff in New Delhi on Monday has brought into sharp focus India’s growing dilemma. While India has strong ties with Israel, it has robust trade ties with Iran owing to its growing energy needs, and is one of Iran’s largest crude oil customers New Delhi also has burgeoning ties with Israel to tend to, reports The Wall Street Journal. “India’s defense purchases from Israel — part of a high-priority modernization of the country’s armed...

(Photo courtesy AP) A 5-member Israeli team, including 2 MOSSAD members, has arrived in New Delhi to help in the investigations following a deadly attack near the Israeli embassy in which Ms Tal Yehoshua-Koren, a staffer of the Israeli embassy’s accounts department, was seriously injured. She was on her way from office to the American Embassy School to pick up her children. Tal Yehoshua’s condition is stable after having undergone two surgeries at a hospital in New Delhi’s diplomatic...

As compared with the Brits, few Americans have made India their home. Among those Americans who became well-known, I wrote about the legendary Samuel Evans Stokes Jr who fought along with Mahatma Gandhi to free the country from the colonial rule, and also brought horticulture revolution in the hills. The other well-known figure is an Indian actor of American origin – Tom Alter – who is now a household name. Born to an American Christian missionary couple, Tom Alter acted in several Bollywood...

At a time when President Barack Obama seems to have handled relatively well diverse foreign policy challenges, many inherited from his predecessor, his handling of the economic policy and the Wall Street have remained a big question mark. Obama’s continuing reliance on U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and kowtowing to the bankers, makes one wonder whether the President has learned his lessons. All eyes are now on Noam Scheiber’s blockbuster book on the Obama economic team. Here’s...

A Sikh ready for the holy bath at Golden Temple in Amritsar in northern India. Ever heard of a place where you can enjoy live Western classical music round-the-clock? Perhaps there is none. However, if you are interested in attending a non-stop Indian classical music concert round the year, then the place to visit is the Golden Temple (or Harmandir Sahib) at Amritsar in northern India. This place is the rallying point of the followers of Sikh religion worldwide. Music wafts across with different...

At a time when America appears lost, and its leadership continues its reckless bid for global supremacy, it is interesting to recall the story of the only American who participated in India’s freedom struggle and was imprisoned by the British-Indian government. He gave up Western clothes and donned home-spun Khadi dress. A highly impressed Mahatma Gandhi wrote in his Young India: “No Indian is giving such battle to the (British-Indian) Government as Mr. Samuel Evans Stokes Jr. He has veritably...

Anna Hazare, 73, is no ordinary social activist. Hazare has emerged as a sort of national hero battling against the government that has been reeling under mind-boggling corruption scandals. An Indian government attempt to head off a political crisis by arresting him appeared to backfire Tuesday when parliament’s opposition members walked out and demonstrations broke out across the country. See here… (UPDATE: In view of the mass protests, the government has buckled under and ordered the...

The shooting down of an American helicopter carrying the elite Navy SEALs in Afghanistan has been described as the deadliest single loss for U.S. forces in the decade-long war in Afghanistan. See here… A Pakistani newspaper says that the Abbottabad raid by US Navy Seals was not the first venture into Pakistan. The team had surreptitiously entered the country on ten to twelve previous occasions, the influential investigative magazine New Yorker said in an over 8,000-word story on the Abbottabad...

Was this tragedy waiting to happen? Are Anders Behring Breivik’s murders another brutal manifestation of the hysteria that started building up post 9/11? George W. Bush and his team in the White House began an era of hatred and revenge, and have added enough fuel to create confusion and fire to last a few decades. We can still see widespread smoke, if not flames, in the West and elsewhere. Was the fire of rage that came from the gun of Anders Behring Breivik a result of dangerous propaganda...

Damning evidence has been surfacing during the past decades revealing how different US administrations have been looking the other way despite Pakistan military establishment’s open role in supplying nuclear know-how to rogue regimes. Now A.Q. Khan, the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb program, asserts that the government of North Korea bribed top military officials in Islamabad to obtain access to sensitive nuclear technology in the late 1990s. Abdul Qadeer Khan has made available documents...

The New Yorker sums up the murky media Mughal Murdoch scandal thus: “Rupert Murdoch and his people have claimed that the newspaper scandal in London was caused by a few rotten apples. Now that a very large apple, Rebekah Brooks, has been arrested, it is clear that it is the entire barrel that is rotten.” Brooks is a former News International chief. Meanwhile London’s police chief resigned last night, putting more pressure on prime minister David Cameron over his personal links...

More trouble for the Australian-American media mughal Rupert Murdoch and his family. It is likely that Andy Coulson, a former News Of The World editor who most recently worked as the chief spokesman for British Prime Minister David Cameron’s government, would be arrested Friday on suspicion of illegally paying the police for information during his editorship of Murdoch-owned tabloid. [UPDATE: He has been arrested. The Washington Post reports: The former editor of the British tabloid at the heart...

The Obama administration had at least the guts to justify the continued squandering of public money on the so-called war-on-terror in Afghanistan by formally handing over the foreign policy to the CIA and the Pentagon with a seemingly “limitless budget”.(see here). But why is the American media quiet on the cost of war that is crippling US economy — such as the U.S. military’s expenditure of $ 20.2 billion on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan every year? “That’s...