Cameron Urges India to Lift Barriers to Trade to Create Jobs
July 28 (Bloomberg) -- U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron will press India today to remove barriers to free trade to create thousands of jobs in both countries.

Cameron is visiting the southern city of Bangalore, India’s technology hub, with a delegation that includes 39 business leaders and four members of his Cabinet. The premier will seek to sell Britain as a place for Indian companies to do business while asking India to create opportunities for ... Read More

Songs of the Saints, With Love, From Pakistan
By JON PARELES

Hands waved overhead. Voices shouted lyrics and whooped with delight. Children were hoisted onto parents’ shoulders. In the tightly packed crowd a few dancers made room to jump. T-shirts were tossed to fans from the stage.

Yet in the songs that Abida Parveen was singing, saints were praised. They were Islamic saints, the poets and philosophers revered by Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam. It was the first New York Sufi Music Festival, a ... Read More

The Yoga Mogul
By MIMI SWARTZ

There is so much going on in John Friend’s life right now that an assistant once teased him about waking just before dawn and calling to ask for coffee, only to be reminded that he, Friend, was in Quito, Munich or Seoul, while the assistant was back at home base in the Woodlands, a cushy suburb north of Houston. That Friend, the founder of Anusara, one of the world’s fastest-growing styles of yoga, ... Read More

India's Gandhi God-Kings
By SADANAND DHUME

Opaque family rule is no way to run a political party, let alone a major economy and aspiring great power.

To make sense of the latest storm in the tea cup of Indian politics, you need to wrap your mind around a curious epithet: intellectual arrogance. That, says Digvijay Singh, a senior leader of the ruling Congress Party, is the problem with Home Minister P. Chidambaram, the man tasked with perhaps the toughest job ... Read More

Clinton Encounters a Less Hostile Reception in Pakistan
By MARK LANDLER

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The last time Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was in Pakistan, less than a year ago, she was asked when the United States would stop killing innocent civilians in its covert drone attacks. She, in turn, suggested that officials in the Pakistani government knew where Al Qaeda’s leaders were hiding.

The mood was noticeably less toxic on Monday, perhaps in part because Mrs. Clinton showed up with more than ... Read More

India’s calibrated approach on Pak
K.P. NAYAR

Washington, July 17: Exactly a year after the UPA government was convulsed by a joint statement by India and Pakistan in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s policy of rapprochement with Pakistan has reached its “Sharm-el-Sheikh point” for the second time.

But unlike in July 2009, by the wisdom of hindsight, Singh did not let Pakistan this week to rock the Indian boat in political terms.

India has emerged from the foreign minister-level talks ... Read More

With Canadian help Bhutan shows the way to GNH
It’s one of the most challenging international airports in the world, with a hairy approach that involves threading the plane through surrounding Himalayan peaks.

Fewer than 15 people are said to be allowed to pilot passenger planes into Paro airport, near the Bhutanese capital of Thimphu. But getting on the ground safely isn’t the only reason Ron Colman feels his nerves settle each time he sets foot in the country.

“You get out and it’s ... Read More

For Indian Americans, TV channels offer a taste of the old country
By Kavita Daswani, Special to the Los Angeles Times

July 11, 2010

Every evening, millions of families in India gather around their TV sets to watch "Balika Vadhu," a soap opera about a married 8-year-old girl. At the same time, Indian households in the U.S. that have access to it switch to Appka Colors on the Dish Network to catch the child-bride saga, weighing in with their friends and relatives in India on online message boards.

That ... Read More

Pakistan’s Sufis end their silence
The white marble of the ancient Sufi shrine in Lahore, where suicide bombers killed 43 people last week, seems unblemished by the attack. The blackened rubble has been swept away. The saint who died here almost a thousand years ago continues his slumber beneath the carved arches and echoing halls.

But the moderate Muslims who consider this the holiest shrine in Pakistan say they have finally woken up. Leaders of the Barelvi, the country's largest sect, ... Read More

Kerala Christian Professor Mutilated by Muslim Fundamentalists
Dr. O. P. Sudrania

Yet again the fundamentalists in Kerala State of India are on the prowl. This time they are aggrieved with this Christian Professor in a local College for an alleged blasphemous question paper involving the prophet, which has infuriated them. While others allege that there was no such blasphemous issue was involved to cause a stigma and undue fury.

The story as reproduced here is run in the major news media in India, “Lecturer ... Read More

Celebrating Diversity And Inclusiveness In The Age Of Consent
Medha Patkar

(CNS): One year ago, on July 2nd 2009, a Delhi High Court division bench of Chief Justice AP Shah and Justice S Muralidhar said "We declare that Section 377 IPC, insofar it criminalizes consensual sexual acts of adults in private, is violative of Articles 21, 14 and 15 of the Constitution." It upheld one of the primary principles of natural justice, 'right to consent' and restored the dignity and rights of millions of those ... Read More

My Own Private India
By Joel Stein

I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J. The mostly white suburban town I left when I graduated from high school in 1989 — the town that was called Menlo Park when Thomas Alva Edison set up shop there and was later renamed in his honor — has become home to one of the biggest Indian communities in the U.S., as familiar to people in ... Read More