UPSC toppers -- Ira Singhal, Nidhi Gupta, Vandana Rao and Suharsha Bhagat -- tell Rediff.com how they cracked the tough national exam.
Nearly a thousand people from different faiths gathered today to pay homage to the six Sikh worshippers gunned down inside a Gurdwara by a white supremacist here last year, as a sea of candles and emotional tributes marked the tragic incident's anniversary.
'The government's proposal to store citizens' data including Aadhaar data under its Digital India initiative on cloud is violative of the citizens' human rights because the cloud is admittedly beyond India's jurisdiction.'
The Supreme Court today ordered that former Comptroller and Auditor General of India Vinod Rai will supervise special audit of property of Kerala's famous Sree Padmanabha Swamy temple, which is facing charges of financial irregularites, and constituted a new administrative committee headed by District Judge, Thiruvananthapuram.
China is spending billions of dollars to improve infrastructure in Tibet and other parts of its border with India. Claude Arpi explains why New Delhi can't afford to ignore Beijing's plans.
Pakistan faces a challenge largely of its own creation and only political processes can correct it, argues Raza Rumi.
United Progressive Alliance's abysmal performance and the Bharatiya Janata Party's claims of good governance are two factors that could change how India votes this year, says Shreekant Sambrani
'History will never forgive Manmohan Singh for having ended the Indian growth story and created a culture of entitlement instead of creating a culture of hard work and development,' says Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
'There is a Jack Warner or two in every Caribbean parliament today.'
'For Nitish Kumar the message is to be democratic. With the support of the BJP, he had suppressed criticism in Bihar. He would also need to change his highly authoritarian way of governance.' 'The Grand Alliance, given the decisive mandate in its favour, cannot afford to fail the people. They have a duty to make it a model for the rest of India,' says Apoorvanand.
The State must stand as a solid tower of confidence to provide a guarantee of safety to its citizens and instill fear in the hearts of offenders. But where is that State, asks Tarun Vijay
In embarking on building the world's tallest statue, Modi is hoping his stature will also rise - if not across India then at least in Gujarat, says Bharat Bhushan.
There is speculation that China released the White Paper on Tibet in a hurry after a Spanish court agreed to hear charges of genocide against former Chinese president Hu Jintao. Ajai Shukla reports
'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.
From early indications, the Modi government's foreign policy seems to be pragmatic and reciprocal, says K G Suresh.
The Uttar Pradesh government on Wednesday reluctantly admitted before the National Green Tribunal that illegal sand mining was going on in the state and not even a single environmental clearance had been granted for it in Gautam Budh Nagar district.
'How come with Nehru at the helm, India missed so many buses? He had such unchallenged power that he could have taken the country in any direction he wanted. The sad conclusion is inescapable that Nehru let things drift in true Hamletian ambivalence,' says B S Raghavan.
'We keep climbing one step and slipping three. In 2004, our relay team was 7th in the world. Then we slipped from there. Otherwise, today our 4x400 metres relay team would have been gearing for a medal at the Rio Games.' 'If we need to compete at the world level, our thinking needs to be at world level. You can't have akhada thinking.'
'The Pakistan government, we were told, has a plan to renovate several Hindu temples and Buddhist sites, which over the years have fallen into disrepair. The aim is to create a pilgrimage circuit to attract visitors from all over the subcontinent.'
The following is the full text of US President Donald Trump's first address to a joint session of the Congress on February 28, as prepared for delivery and released by the White House press office.
Jyoti Punwani examines the relevance of the Sairat, the hit Marathi film everyone is talking about, in today's times.
You just cannot let an institution go adrift and never reporting to any other institution and never submitting itself to any monitoring review or evaluation with regard to its functioning and particularly with regards to an institution which has dominion over the lives and liberties of citizens. That kind of total abdication of government responsibility with regard to that kind of an institution will be dangerous to democracy itself, to the people, Bahukutumbi Raghavan tells Sheela Bhatt
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who recently completed one year in office, has, in an exclusive interview with Smita Prakash, editor, ANI, said the opposition alleging that his government is a "suit boot ki sarkar" is definitely better and more acceptable than being labelled a "suitcase" (ki sarkar), and satirically added, that after ruling for sixty years, the Congress has suddenly remembered the poor.
President Pranab Mukherjee on Monday addressed the first joint sitting of Parliament as mandatorily required under the Constitution after the general elections. The address is the political, economic and foreign policy road map of the Narendra Modi government and covers virtually all crucial areas.
Contentious issues such as the construction of a Ram Temple in Ayodhya, abrogation of Art 370 giving special status to Jammu and Kashmir and enactment of Uniform Civil Code have been included in the Bharatiya Janata Party's election manifesto with the party making promises on them.
Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals were suspended from the Indian Premier League for two years for betting activities of their key officials, Gurunath Meiyappan and Raj Kundra, during the 2013 season of cash-rich Twenty20 cricket tournament.
'Kejriwal has taken a leaf out of Modi's campaign of 2014 and improved upon it.' 'That suit will haunt Modi till he exits politics.' 'Of all the factors that favoured Kejriwal, the biggest was the arrogance and over-confidence of the Modi-Shah led BJP.' 'What the Congress could not do in the last two decades in Gujarat, Kejriwal did it in no time in Delhi.' 'The BJP has behaved exactly like the Congress in decoding Kejriwal's politics.'
'If Indira Gandhi's Emergency proved anything at all, it established that India would be governed, to the extent it can be governed, democratically or not at all,' says Inder Malhotra.
In his penultimate State of the Union address, Barack Obama said that the economy is improving.
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