'Any Muslim who shows even the slightest hint of revolutionary thought is marked as 'infected'.' 'At that point, he is taken to the nearest Detention Centre where a procedure called Reconditioning awaits him.' 'Areas with a high Muslim population have been designated as Scheduled Religion Zones.' 'To be an active participant in this social cleansing ritual, there is only one prerequisite: You have to be an undying patriot whose friend and family is his country.'
Have you heard of the Burning Man festival? Or the Monkey Buffet festival?
Communist China has recently developed a great expertise in 'soul reincarnation', feels Claude Arpi
Desis in the US recall their earliest celebration of the festival of lights on American soil. Chaya Babu reports
'Mahesh Bhavana is a young man who is beaten up in the town's marketplace and who consequently pledges that he won't wear his slippers again, till he avenges the beating.' 'But Mahesh can't get his revenge that easily -- his punisher is off to a distant land. So what does Mahesh do? He waits. And the town waits with him. And we wait with him.' 'Maheshinte Prathikaram is one of those movies where I didn't know what hit me. I don't remember another movie -- at least in recent times -- that I surrendered to with such happiness,' says Sreehari Nair.
'It will be our attempt that in order to get the country out of the condition it is in because of their (the BJP) coming to power, the Congress will go to them (leaders of parties opposed to the BJP) and if there is need for support we shall do so too.'
The sops sanctioned by J Jayalalithaa on her first day in office could cost the exchequer up to Rs 8,000 crore annually.
'No civilised nation can thrive if it is possessed with the spirit of Hindutva.'
Aseem Chhabra mourns the passing of the gentle and knowledgeable Mr K D Singh, who owned a quaint bookshop in New Delhi.
Bharatiya Janata Party leader Sushma Swaraj is a fighter who follows her own code. Those who think she's a pushover are making a mistake, says Aditi Phadnis
Here's a glimpse at what happened around the world last week
The moot point is if a re-energised Jayalalitha will order snap polls when the Opposition is in disarray and her own political starts are on the rise, says N Nathiya Moorthy.
Dum Laga Ke Haisha is a series of riveting moments that make you moist in the eye and chuckle with joy, says Sukanya Verma.
For his 60th birthday in December, which he called his third 20th birthday, Mallya flew in Enrique Iglesias to perform at his villa overlooking the beach in Goa.
'At one of the UK's best known museums, one of our greatest sculptures had been placed next to a public toilet.' 'This perception that art antiquities are better looked after in the West is one created by the cultural elite of our country.'
Some stunning moments of the week that was
Why are far right Hindu organisations growing in strength? Why is there a rising subscription to Neo-Wahabism, the Saudi Arabian version of contemporary Islam?
'Politics and religion can be a combustive combination, but this once I am pleased that Pinarayi Vijayan made an issue of a rather innocuous tweet by Amit Shah.' 'It provided the perfect excuse to seek respite from political pronouncements and take (temporary) refuge in the classics,' says T V R Shenoy.
When the bench asked Sibal 'shouldn't we hear the matter', he replied, 'Yes. You shouldn't.'
'This has been an ongoing process,' says Ambassador B S Prakash, India's former consul general in San Francisco, 'but I believe a Modi visit to the West Coast can be a force-multiplier.'
'Is there a connection between the way we pitched the entire issue of Udta Punjab's censorship and the apologetic, full-of-very-specific-answers tone of the movie?' 'Maybe it's just me, but as an Indian liberal, I am more scared of us liberals than I am of the average Indian conservative bloke,' says Sreehari Nair.
'there is absolutely no question that the Hinduism of the mob-lynchers, the people who have actually gone and killed others because of what they are eating or how they are worshipping or the faith they belong to or what they're doing professionally, those are, to my mind, not Hindus at all.' 'Hinduism needs to be reclaimed for the Hindus who are not bigots.'
Residents anxious after masked gunmen break into 4 desi homes in New Jersey, many disappointed over the police's response to the violent crimes. Arthur J Pais reports from New Jersey.
'In today's India very few would, of course, stand Basavanna's test. This led Professor Kalburgi to not only take on casteist and conservative forces in general, but also some powerful conservatives among Lingayats.' 'Conservatives found him polarising and some researchers disagreed with his speculations while admiring his scholarship, but he posited that culture studies and historians have to perforce join the dots, speculate, interpret, interpolate, extrapolate and take leaps to make progress even if some of them later turn out to be wrong.' Shivanand Kanavi salutes Professor M M Kalburgi, the scholar who was assassinated in Dharwad on Sunday, August 30.
'Not allowing people to speak or listen is the biggest act of anti-nationalism,' says Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, one of India's finest poets.
