Religion & Power in India The Architects of Chaos The Brahminical Role and the Riddle of Morality How the custodians of Hinduism built a theology of convenient truths — and what it cost the civilisation they claimed to protect HYDERABAD | Special Report I n the long history of organised religion, few questions are as disorienting as a simple one posed by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar at the opening of his seminal work Riddles in Hinduism: why is a Hindu a Hindu? A Parsi can answer in a sentence. A Muslim can answer in five words. A Christian's answer fits on a bumper sticker. Ask a Hindu, and the question opens into a labyrinth — of competing gods, contradictory scriptures, incompatible philosophies, and a social order that claims divine sanction while being visibly constructed by human hands. This is not an accident. It is, Ambedkar argued, the product of a sustained and largely successful project of institutional design — one whose architect...
The Cracks in America's Sanctions Empire: How China Is Rewriting the Rules of Global Trade For decades, Washington could tell the world who it could do business with. That era may be ending. Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan A Routine Blacklisting That Wasn't On April 24, 2025, the U.S. Treasury Department added five Chinese oil refineries to its sanctions list — punishment for purchasing Iranian crude oil in violation of American restrictions. On paper, it looked like business as usual. Since the 1990s, the United States has imposed economic sanctions more than any other country in history. By 2024, the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) maintained sanctions programs targeting over 20 countries , more than 9,000 individuals and entities , and used this tool more than 10 times as often as it did two decades ago. The dollar's dominance — it accounts for roughly 58% of global foreign exchange reserves and underpins nearly 88% of all international trade ...