Suddenly the sands are shifting and even friends are acting strange.
The absence of top stars took some sheen away but India's record-breaking medal haul and a maiden top-of-the-table finish made the just-concluded 22nd Asian Athletics Championship here a memorable one.
China on Monday said India's membership bid in the NSG has become "more complicated" under the "new circumstances" as it again ruled out backing New Delhi's entry in the grouping, saying there should be non-discriminatory solution applicable to all non-NPT signatory countries.
>There's still hope and plenty to play for, says Rediff.com's Aruneel Sadadekar.
The SIT found and reported that there was no amount shown in almost 289 HSBC Geneva entries, while 122 of them were repeated twice in the same list.
Other large recipients are China ($64 billion), the Philippines ($28 billion), Mexico ($24 billion), Nigeria ($21 billion), Egypt ($18 billion), Pakistan ($17 billion), Bangladesh ($15 billion), Vietnam ($11 billion) and Ukraine ($9 billion).
'Whichever option India chooses, it should be clear to the government that the China-Pakistan nexus poses a clear and present danger to national security,' says Brigadier Gurmeet Kanwal (retd).
The prime minister said there was a need to demonstrate strong and collective will to defeat terror networks that cause bloodshed and spread fear.
NRIs still send largest remittances than counterparts elsewhere.
Bollywood star Salman Khan's appointment as the Indian Olympic contingent's goodwill ambassador has not gone down well with star wrestler Yogeshwar Dutt, who feels a sportsperson should have been chosen for the role. Salman, who is playing the role of a wrestler in his upcoming film 'Sultan', was named goodwill ambassador by the Indian Olympic Association on Saturday in the presence of star woman boxer M C Mary Kom, hockey captain Sardar Singh, and shooter Apurvi Chandela among others. Yogeshwar, the London Olympics bronze-medallist, said he cannot understand what purpose such an appointment will serve for the athletes. "Everybody has the right to promote movies in India, but Olympics is not a place to promote films." Yogeshwar tweeted in Hindi. "Can anyone tell me what the role of goodwill ambassador is? Why are you fooling the public?" he added.
'Surely, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will not be able to pay or compensate the Russians for deployment and use of Russian men and equipment,' says Brigadier S K Chatterji (retd).
An ambitious project to awaken a sleeping giant of Asian soccer looks like confirming Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's famous remark that India pricks up its ears only when comparisons with China are made. With China embarked on a multi-billion dollar mission to become a soccer superpower by 2050, India looks set to follow suit with its own plan to raise its status in the game to match its burgeoning economic power. Come October, India, most famously described as soccer's sleeping giant by former FIFA president Sepp Blatter, will launch a programme to engage more than 11 million children in soccer-related activities.
News of all that's transpired on and off the football field.
Yogeshwar Dutt is aiming for a yellow metal at next year's World Championships and thereby earn an automatic berth in the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Indian tennis ace Sania Mirza was spotted in the 17th Asian Games village in Incheon on Wednesday.
'The BJP has bent. Pakistan has not changed a single thing. It is the BJP and its supporters who have changed. And this is a very good thing,' says Aakar Patel.
The readouts by the Indian and Chinese sides on the meeting on Monday between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Moscow bring out that divergences are crowding into the centrestage of their relationship, says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
Sadly, for hundreds of millions in India, that inequality from their birth and the utterly inadequate schooling and health care they receive thereafter mean that the lottery is stacked against them.
'... For the India-US relationship to continue its positive trajectory, it will require India to adapt to a different approach.' Nisha Desai Biswal -- who as the Obama administration's point person for South Asia was in the inner circle of all the Obama-Modi Summits -- tells Rediff.com's Monali Sarkar why she is hopeful that India and the US are on an irreversible forward course.
In a major breakthrough in China's worst terrorist attack at the Kunming railway station, police on Monday captured three militants from the restive Xinjiang province who fled the scene of slashing rampage that killed 33 people and injured 143 others.
Srikanth Kondapalli on what to expect from the seventh BRICS summit meeting to be held in Russia in July.
New Delhi must indicate to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani that it has a long-term strategy for his country. It should point out that Pakistan's present Afgan policy will destabilise Afghanistan and help Islamic State, says Gautam Sen.
News of all that's transpired on and off the football field
104 years after it was first written, and 76 years after the poet's clarification, the controversy surrounding Rabindranath Tagore's Jana Gana Mana refuses to go away.
How much money the Modi government has already spent and is going to spend on all those foreign trips, muses Sunita Iyer
'India stands on the broad shoulders of an extraordinary civilisation. In some ways it is quite surprising that it hasn't fully embraced the power of that.' 'The prime minister speaks about Make in India. Let's remind ourselves also of Made in India. What made India great. What are the great things of the past which will help us make India even greater.' 'India stands on the broad shoulders of an extraordinary civilisation. In some ways it is quite surprising that it hasn't fully embraced the power of that.'
Saturday marks the Zoroastrian New Year or Navroze. Coomi Selod shares with us these special recipes that are prepared on this special day.
With EU, it is part of the FTA that we will need to negotiate.
The Security Council as it is today is unable to bring peace and security in the world and so there is reason for countries like India to become members of the Council, Ambassador Asoke Kumar Mukerji tells Sheela Bhatt/Rediff.com.
An inspired performance from Douglas Costa helped Brazil to a 3-0 win over Peru on Tuesday and lifted them into third place in the South American qualifying group for the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
With Beijing having had a profound rethink on India's admission as a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the tectonic plates of the geopolitics of a massive swathe of the planet stretching from the Asia-Pacific to West Asia are dramatically shifting. That grating noise in the Central Asian steppes will be heard far and wide -- as far as North America, says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
