A friend called me a few weeks ago, sounding relieved. He is 48. His doctor had ordered a coronary calcium scan and the score came back zero. In his mind, that settled it. His LDL cholesterol (the “bad cholesterol”) has been sitting around 150 mg/dL for years (higher than the 100 mg/dL that is recommended…
Private universities are filing weak patent applications to improve their rankings. The government should change the rules. The S&P 500 is one of the world’s best-known stock market indexes. The companies in it are worth about $70 trillion altogether. But here is something interesting: about 92% of their value now comes not from things such…
Great cities are defined not only by the infrastructure they build, but by what they preserve, restore, and pass on to future generations. Delhi is uniquely endowed in both respects. The Yamuna and its floodplains, the Ridge, urban forests, biodiversity parks, and neighbourhood greens form the city’s ecological foundation. Simultaneously, its monuments, historic precincts, archaeological…
There is a particular sound a brand makes when it folds. It is not a scream. It is the soft, laminated hum of a legal-and-comms note being read aloud by someone who has never in their life used the word “sentiments” in a sentence they meant. GIVA made that sound earlier this month. Its thirty-five-second…
Hello and welcome to another edition of The Weekly Vine. If you asked my mother to write the Vine, she could write every edition about my departures from normative behaviour during my childhood and adolescence. From my follicular adventures — which included a mohawk and the Salman Khan Tere Naam haircut — to not taking exams seriously, she has a…
This week, we are tracking: Modi, Xi and the art of Trump-proofing foreign policy The TOI went back to school: Don’t be shocked by what we found 7.8% growth, a Rs 6 lakh crore revision and the GDP puzzle explained ‘Eye in the sky’: Isro’s EOS-05 gives India a strategic edge The age of Trump:…
What do passports, billions of dollars and an Indian cowboy have in common? They all feature in this week’s TOI Bharat Abroad. From a fresh US immigration headache and a record NRI money rush to an Indian-origin executive taking over Adobe, the diaspora has had quite the week. And yes, there’s also a seven-year-old taking…
The Himalaya is a landscape of extremes: young and tectonically active mountains, glaciers, steep slopes, unstable rocks, and powerful rivers are increasingly influenced by rapid climatic change. But the catastrophic event of 26 August 2026 in the Rasuwa–Gyirong region along the Nepal–Tibet border demonstrated something even more important: in high mountains, a disaster rarely begins…
As we continue to know more about Guru Padmasambhava, the sat-guru of GMCKS, his life & contribution to the world is worth mentioning. His influence extends from India to Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, Sikkim, Ladakh, Arunachal Pradesh and the wider Himalayan world. The Nyingma tradition in particular regards him as a foundational master, while Bhutan reveres…
There was a time when becoming a guru required inconvenience. You had to retreat to the mountains, renounce a reasonable quantity of worldly goods, sit under a tree for an unreasonable length of time, acquire disciples, develop some familiarity with the human condition, and then wait until somebody else began referring to you as wise….
