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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi turned 76 on Thursday and spent the day opening SEMICON India 2026, a semiconductor conference and exhibition in New Delhi. The day brought together two priorities the Indian prime minister has increasingly put at the centre of his public message, of building manufacturing capacity at home and giving developing nations a larger voice abroad. Modi was born on 17 September 1950 in Vadnagar, Gujarat. He will soon complete 25 years in elected executive office, having first become Gujarat chief minister in 2001 before taking over as prime minister in 2014. Image Source: @narendramodi on X In that time his role has widened from state administrator to host of global summits. On 12 and 13 September, India hosted the BRICS summit in New Delhi, where leaders unanimously adopted the New Delhi Declaration. The declaration reaffirmed the bloc's commitment to consensus, cooperation, inclusive growth and a more representative international order. Modi has fra...

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...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman I have been a journalist for most of my adult life and this country has become my beat, my burden and perhaps my greatest blessing. This journey has led me to cover India from its plains and its hills, from the coaching centres and the press conferences, from literary festivals, from the front lines of protests to the inside and outside of its policy corridors. I have watched promises made at election rallies dissolve in the unforgiving heat of governance. I have seen individuals become symbols and symbols become power and power become something so sinister that I will leave it unnamed here. I write of these things to establish a vantage point as essential context because what follows is written from the inside, from the ground, with the accumulated scepticism of someone who has seen some bit of this republic to resist, on this particular day, both the celebration and the denunciation that today's milestone will produ...