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✍️ Written by Saket Suman The first thing the world's leaders saw when they arrived at Bharat Mandapam on September 12 was not a flag, not a map, not a welcome banner with diplomatic language about cooperation and shared futures. It was a 27-foot golden dancing Shiva — the Nataraja, the Lord of the Cosmic Dance — standing at the entrance in the early Delhi morning, arms extended in four directions, one leg raised, one foot trampling the demon of ignorance , a ring of fire encircling the whole thing, made from an alloy of eight metals including traces of silver and gold, weighing approximately 18 to 20 tonnes, cast without a single welded joint using a technique that goes back to Mohenjo-Daro. Image Source: @AmitShah on X This was what caught everybody's eyes before a word of diplomatic language was exchanged, before the declarations and the bilaterals and the joint statements and the photograph in which leaders stood before this very dance...

Donald Trump was not in the room at Bharat Mandapam but he was the reason the room was full.  When the American President threatened 100 percent tariffs on BRICS members who try to replace the dollar, when he increased tariffs on Indian goods to 50 percent and added an extra 25 percent as punishment for buying Russian oil, when he threatened an additional 10 percent on countries backing what he called BRICS's anti-American policy, he was deliberately doing something that no amount of Indian diplomacy could have managed on its own. He gave the world's largest alternative multilateral forum the urgency it had been struggling to find. Eleven nations representing nearly half the world's population came to New Delhi partly because the alternative, standing alone before a tariff-wielding, sanction-wielding, dollar-wielding Washington, had become considerably more frightening than sitting in the same room as each other. Image Source: @VikramMisri on X Indian Prime Minister Modi un...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sat down with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the bilateral meeting ahead of the BRICS Summit and handed him a gift. It was a very thoughtful Russian-language translation of the Thirukkural, the 1,330 couplet Tamil classical text attributed to one of our greatest philosophers Thiruvalluvar, composed somewhere between the 4th century BCE and the 6th century CE, translated into more than 107 languages, claimed by Jains, Hindus, and Christians alike. Image Source: MEA India Putin accepted it.  The following evening, at the official gala dinner hosted by Modi at Bharat Mandapam, Putin and all other visiting dignitaries were served Khumb Galouti — tender pan-grilled mushroom kebabs with mint pearls on sheermal bread. Paneer Lababdar. Gucchi Marmik, Himalayan morel mushrooms with saffron and mamra almonds. Beetroot Raita. Shahtoot Phirni — slow-cooked pudding topped with sweet mulberr...

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sat down with Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi a  day before the 18th BRICS Summit had formally opened.  The readout mentioned something almost nobody noticed, that the two leaders had discussed the conflicts in West Asia and the Black Sea region and their impact on "the safety and security of Indian seafarers." A few hours later, Modi met Masoud Pezeshkian, the President of Iran. The readout said the same thing in different words, that freedom of navigation, freedom of commerce, the safety and well-being of seafarers. The following morning, Modi walked into Bharat Mandapam and proposed a BRICS Seafarers Emergency Support Network. Two consecutive bilaterals. The same Indian workers named in both. Then a specific institutional proposal in the summit speech the next morning. No body connected these three things because everyone was watching Chinese President Xi Jinping's plane land. Image Source: MEA India India has over thre...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman A glacier collapsed on Langtang Lirung on the Nepal-China border and fell five kilometres into the valley below o n the morning of August 26, 2026 . The Bhotekoshi river reached the gauge at Syabrubesi in thirteen minutes. The warning texts went out to residents of Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading and Chitwan thirty-eight minutes after the collapse. At least 1,369 people died in Nepal. Forty-three died in Tibet. The bodies of some victims were carried as many as 240 kilometres into India. We now know that there was no transboundary monitoring arrangement between China and Nepal, or between China and India, covering the slope that failed. There never was. Seventeen days later, the leaders of India and China will meet in New Delhi. File Photo: @China_Amb_India I want to begin there because everything else will make more sense if we start with the glacier. The Third Pole, as scientists call the Hindu Kush-Himalayan system, is w...

The Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi will host the 18th BRICS Leaders' Summit on September 12 and 13. This will be the culmination of India's fourth chairship of a grouping that has, in twenty years, gone from an economist's acronym to an eleven-nation bloc representing nearly half the world's population. Vladimir Putin is confirmed. Xi Jinping is expected, though Beijing has not formally said so — his preparations are underway and if he arrives it will be his first visit to India since the informal summit with Modi at Mamallapuram in October 2019. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and several other leaders from member and partner nations are on the list. Central government offices in Delhi are closed tomorrow for logistics. The capital has been building toward this for months. File Photo/Representational; Via: @AmitShah on X The G20 presidency in 2023...

A five-storey paying guest accommodation called Hostel Daze collapsed in Delhi's Satya Niketan area on Sunday afternoon and killed at least seven young men and injured dozens more, with the toll feared to rise further. The building was said to be fifty years old. It had already tilted visibly. Construction work was underway on its ground floor. This is being described as a tragedy but it is instead the policy, the inevitable physical consequence of a set of decisions that successive governments have made, decade after decade, about whose comfort the Indian state considers itself responsible for and whose it does not. A total of seven deaths have been confirmed in the incident.  About two weeks before the Satya Niketan collapse, India's most trusted news agency, the Press Trust of India (PTI), published the results of an RTI query revealing that the Indian government spent Rs 92.35 crore in 2025-26 in maintaining the official residences of Union ministers in Lutyens' Delhi....

On September 4, 2026, HarperCollins India announced that it would publish Belonging: A Journey of Love by Sonia Gandhi on November 10. This is the same date as its worldwide release by Alfred A. Knopf in the United States. The announcement came exactly one week after Penguin Random House India issued a statement clarifying that it was not, in fact, the Indian publisher of the book, and that any suggestion it had decided against publishing because Sonia Gandhi had declined editorial changes did not "accurately reflect the circumstances." Representational Image Source: @ckmbsnl on X The careful grammar of that sentence deserves some attention. Penguin did not say the reports were wrong. It said they did not accurately reflect the circumstances. It said it was "willing and keen" to publish. It declined to disclose the details of its discussions, citing confidentiality. What it did not say, and what the publishing world noted,  was what those circumstances actually we...