World Focus

Until his death in 2003, Bhishma Sahni was one of India’s most renowned Hindi language authors and playwrites. His 1974 controversial and popular novel ‘Tamas’ (Darkness) won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1975 and in 1987 was made into a television series for the national channel Doordarshan. Sahni wrote about the exodus of Hindus and [...]

The recent furore against allowing Wal-Mart and other western multinational companies into India ’s lucrative retail sector is based upon fears that it will bankrupt the small retails who have been at the hub of that country’s consumer sector. There are fears that these small family run businesses will be unable to cope against the titanic behemoths [...]

The basis of western civilisation and culture is Judeo-Christian mixed with aspects of the Hellenistic and Roman world, known as the classical era. Despite the decline in religious belief in the west there remain some very deeply committed religious people. [...]

Sen. Edward Kennedy The Bangladesh genocide of 1971 was basically directed at 3 sets of people: The Awami League was one target, along with leftist students, and then came the main target, the Hindus. they mostly got who they were targeting, especially the Hindu community of Bangladesh. The Pakistani strategy is evident from the following [...]

In September 2005, the medical journal Lancet reported that the origins of BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) or Mad Cow Disease, which led through the food chain to being variant CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) in humans, had its origins in the funerary practices of Hindus in India. [...]

Independence to India did not change the political system in one important respect. Much colonial legislation remains intact. Most notorious is the Police Act of 1864 which was designed to quell dissent by unruly subjects rather than provide a public service. In fact the very idea of public ‘service’ is an anachronism in India where the ‘steel [...]

It's time for the people to stand up and let the politicians and big business know that we will not let our heritage, religious beliefs and environment be trampled over like this. This episode is in stark contrast to the morals and symbolism provided by the Ramayana which tells the story of how divinity, humanity [...]

My father worked in the Ministry of External Affairs and as such he was transferred out of India to Indonesia, the world's largest Islamic country. I went to an international school, where there was a very limited curriculum about India or Hinduism. [...]

Most racist and colonialist viewpoints of non-European cultures and history are now regarded as outdated. They are recognised as not giving an objective view consistent with responsible academic study, but merely the vehicle by which one was able to peddle the prejudices by what we can now see was a less enlightened age. [...]

Around 2005 we had arranged a talk on the rise of the imaginary 'Hindu Nationalism' at the London School of Economics and had invited Academic Chetan Bhatt to give a talk who was under the impression probably because of our British accents that we were a bunch of colonised Hinduphobes like him, so he accepted. [...]