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✍️ 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...

India has 45 UNESCO World Heritage Sites as of July 2026 — the sixth largest national count in the world, spread across 19 states and union territories, covering everything from prehistoric rock shelters to colonial railway terminals. The number is large enough to suggest comprehensiveness and misleading enough to suggest that comprehensiveness is the point. It is not. The point is that India's built heritage is an argument about what a civilisation does with time when it has enough of it. The Taj Mahal and the Bhimbetka rock shelters are both on the UNESCO list. Between them lies a span of human presence on this subcontinent so large that the word ancient has stopped being useful. Bhimbetka's rock art predates the Indus Valley Civilisation. The Taj was completed in 1653. The span between them is not history in any manageable sense — it is the geological time of human culture compressed into one country. Representational image. IndianRepublic.in This piece covers 30 monuments ...