Reflections

Himalayan states’ non-monetary, but vital, role in the country’s well-being is not acknowledged or taken into account while disbursing Central assistance

Realised knowledge must be accompanied by suitable action that purifies the mind and intellect

We don’t teach girls how to choose love, we teach them how to survive it. Until we make relationships safe, no woman will ever be free

He left this world a broken man and his last words, ‘He Ram’, were both an invocation to his God and a regret for having birthed a nation that forsook his most basic lessons of Truth and Non-violence

Pakistan by their use of war imagery and India by their petulant antics have let cricket down

Dame Jane Goodall’s entire life was taken up by the most difficult job in the world — understanding and protecting the wildernesses and wild denizens of Planet Earth

The pursuer must constantly endeavour to develop and keep his faculty of reasoning sharp

The postal system has seen several changes, but there are so many memories attached

Weird dictums regulate the membership of various clubs

‘All the Way to the River’ is perhaps her boldest work

On his birth anniversary, it is fitting to recall not only the image of Bhagat Singh walking to the gallows, but also his voice, his message

After every setback, language must carry out its mandate to speak into the future with hope and resolve

The extraordinary coat of arms of Undivided Punjab in the dining room of Himachal’s Raj Bhavan is believed to have been done under direction of the College of Arms in London

From symbolic suggestion to representation as a human being, what began as an abstract philosophy took almost god-like form

In this world of money wire transfers, who cares for a handshake!

Such was the quotient of human brotherhood and contentment that even kids neither cried nor squabbled

The spirit of the people who were working at shoring up dams, saving fellow human beings and animals, and providing food and necessities to the displaced arose from the Sikh ethos that are deeply entrenched in the people of Punjab

The decadent lives of Nepal's rich lords and their chiffon-clad ladies go back a long, long way

Do citizens have no right to information? Is public scrutiny a wrong expectation?

Dowry deaths are society-enabled femicides. Women are burned, poisoned, hanged, or pushed off balconies, while we debate “misuse” of laws

Top cricketers willing to endorse anything and everything for money must differentiate between greed and need

Have our methods of dealing with exacerbating disasters altered in any way since the time we were colonial subjects?

A just war is essentially a defensive war. It is not a preemptive war

As the Dalai Lama says, in these trying times, compassion is a necessity and not a virtue. But there is the harder teaching too, that our actions have consequences beyond our intentions

Urdu writer Joginder Paul’s birth centenary: He passed away in 2016, leaving behind a throbbing world of characters and incidents in the parallel world of his fiction