Good to see New Delhi recently dazzling with the much-hyped AI Impact Summit. Experts, policymakers, and tech giants from around the world brainstormed the future of Artificial Intelligence. The stage was filled with talk of "Digital Transformation", apps, the cloud, and smart platforms.

In India, dance and song have been the language of the soul for thousands of years. From temple thresholds to royal courts, and from village squares to the grand stage, classical dance kept the traditions of Bhava (expression), Raga (melody), and Rasa (essence) alive. Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Odissi, and Manipuri, all of these demanded discipline, Sadhana (devoted practice), and dedication. But today’s landscape is changing.

From the desert whispers of films like ‘Koi... Mil Gaya’ to the glowing fingertip of ‘Extra-Terrestrial’, cinema has long hinted that we are not alone. In ‘PK’, an innocent alien questions human rituals, holding up a mirror to our own absurdities. Hollywood counters with the haunting vastness of ‘Interstellar’ and the quiet arrival of the unknown in ‘Arrival’. Literature, too, has dared to imagine cosmic neighbours — from ‘The War of the Worlds’ to ‘Childhood's End’, where the sky is not a ceiling but a corridor.

India’s long battle against Left-Wing Extremism was neither won solely by the bullet nor by the bulldozer. It was shaped by a calibrated blend of security resolve and developmental outreach, a strategy that gradually drained the oxygen from a movement once considered the country’s gravest internal security threat.

Where the flute once played upon its banks, a haunting silence now prevails. The waters where faith once took a holy dip have now turned into poison.

Around Agra Cantt railway station or along Yamuna Kinara Road, you must have seen small children picking scrap plastic. Every few minutes, they lift a chemical-soaked rag to their noses, as if that toxic vapour is their only relief.