Daljeet Mongia and his wife sold their house and moved to a senior citizens' home as advancing age had made it difficult to live alone. Here's a financial plan for them.
Claude Arpi looks at the issues that challenge Sino-Indian relations.
The Panchsheel agreement, jointly initiated by former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his Chinese counterpart Zhou Enlai, turns 50 on June 28, 2004.
India and China plan to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Panchsheel.
'India should today tell China to provide proper facilities in Minsar for Indian yatris visiting Mt Kailash,' says Claude Arpi.
China on Wednesday accused India of "trampling" on the Panchsheel principles and asked New Delhi to "correct its mistakes" as soon as possible by pulling back troops.
Reacting strongly to reports that China has in its recent map shown Arunachal Pradesh as its territory, India on Saturday said "cartographic depictions" do not change reality on the ground and asserted that Arunachal was an integral part of the country.
"People in his birth place, Mangalore, and also those in Bengaluru have been requesting to bury part of his remains in the two cities."
'Unquestionably, the spirit behind the Panchsheel agreement and the 'Hindi Chini bhai bhai' slogan were thrown overboard by the Chinese, and a trust deficit was injected between the two nations.' A revealing excerpt from General J J Singh's The McMahon Line: A Century Of Discord.
'Chinese troops are not geared to fight Indian troops who are battle hardened and acclimatised and are far more hardy.'
The reasons for China's negative response are located in its territorial dispute with India but also to its grand designs of dominating the region from its previous position of being merely a "balancer" between India and Pakistan, points out Srikanth Kondapalli, Professor in Chinese Studies at JNU.
'Like Nehru, too, Modi has found dealing with Beijing more and more difficult and has adopted an increasingly assertive approach towards managing India's northern neighbour.'
Only he, with his tremendous political capital and personal stature, can pull it off, observes B S Raghavan, the veteran civil servant.
The residential markets across NCR observed subdued activity level in the first half of 2013 as compared to the previous review period, it said.
The new government needs to clearly insist on diplomatic reciprocal arrangements with China. While reciprocity is a function of power in bilateral relations, the Modi-led government's responses should be based on India'S inherent strengths, says China expert Srikanth Kondapalli.
Traffic in national capital Delhi and adjoining Gurugram went haywire on Wednesday after heavy rains resulted in waterlogging in many parts of the city.
Special Envoy of the Chinese President and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Monday called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and conveyed his government's keenness to engage with the new Indian dispensation to strengthen cooperation in key areas.
'From Doklam to Wuhan and the return of the India-China relationship to its previous equilibrium is indeed a major contribution of President Xi and PM Modi. Without any doubt they deserve the kudos for their sagacity and their wisdom,' says Ambassador Gautam Bambawale, India's envoy to China during the Wuhan summit.
The prime minister, accompanied by senior officials including National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar, met the Chinese leader just before his travel to Myanmar from this port city.
In the first-ever separate resolution on foreign policy brought in its National Executive in Bengaluru, BJP attacked the previous Congress-led Government, saying "a cursory glance at the 'lost decade' of the UPA, reveals retreat and a loss of direction in engaging with neighbours, ham-handed diplomacy vis--vis Pakistan and a blind-spot in our foreign policy to the Indian Ocean island states."
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch his dream 'Swachh Bharat' campaign on Thursday.
'The Panchsheel Agreement is unique in the annals of international relations as it stands out as a bizarre illustration of a prime minister trading his country's crucial national interests solely to buffer his personal international image,' feels R N Ravi.
Outlining seven principles of engagement for closer cooperation between India and China, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday said the two countries should show sensitivity to each other's interests and sovereignty and move quickly to resolve the boundary issue.
'The BRICS anthem has to necessarily be an anthem of Vedic times -- Walk together, Dream together, Achieve together.' 'And who knows it better than Modi?' says Tarun Vijay.
Describing Bodh Gaya as the "land of enlightenment", Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said his government would develop the site as the spiritual capital for it to serve as a civilisational bond between India and the Buddhist world.
The entire gamut of bilateral ties including the contentious boundary issue was discussed during a "cordial and substantive" engagement between the foreign ministers of India and China in New Delhi who met within two weeks of installation of the Narendra Modi government.
Vice President Hamid Ansari on Monday held talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping and conveyed the new Indian government's interest in furthering bilateral ties, even as he flagged off India's concerns over border related issues during his parleys with the top leadership in Beijing.
Public interest centres on whether the two leaders might make headway in resolving the Sino-Indian boundary dispute.
'As long as Pakistan exists, the situation will not stabilise and violence is bound to erupt from time to time.' 'Though not a final solution, a step that could help localise the abscess -- trifurcate Jammu and Kashmir state into three parts: Jammu, Ladakh and the Valley.'
All the three issues raised by China at the Modi-Xi meeting are either intractable or peripheral to the bilateral relations and suggest conventional methods to placate the other side without yielding much, says Srikanth Kondapalli.
'Delhi was not concerned.' 'It would continue sleeping for several more years, with the result that Indian territory is still occupied by China today,' says Claude Arpi.
'The book has immense value because it reveals the inner workings of the think-tank which appears to provide facts and insights to Modi, though he himself takes the final decisions and articulates them in his characteristic rhetorical style,' says Ambassador T P Sreenivasan.
The BRICS summit offers Modi an excellent platform to reach out to world leaders and conduct diplomacy on the very ticklish issue of reform of the world governance structure, and to exchange notes with his peers on international, regional and bilateral issues on the margins of the meeting, says Rup Narayan Das.
Following is the full text of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's speech at the Central Party School in Beijing on Thursday:
'It is a national shame that the only country that enacted a food security act is now better known as the land of farmer suicides. Indian farming can change only if national irrigation policy is implemented in totality,' Dr M S Swaminathan tells Shobha Warrier/Rediff.com
India and China on Wednesday signed in all nine agreements, including the Border Defence Cooperation Agreement and one on strengthening cooperation on trans-border rivers, after restricted and delegation-level talks that lasted over two hours as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Premier Li Keqiang met for the second time this year for talks which the Indian leader described as "fruitful and productive".
The India that needs strategic alliances, defence cooperation and engaging meaningfully with neighbouring countries is quietly moving ahead with confidence, says Tarun Vijay
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