In opting out of the global platform, the Lalit Kala Akademi and the ministry of culture have robbed the country of an opportunity to roll out its famed soft power. For millions across the world, the 5,000-year-old Indus Valley Civilisation is represented by one iconic image — a dancer cast in bronze. A similar image of contemporary India will be difficult to fi

Despite offering a live demonstration of Bollywood’s reach and soft power, Senecal is not the typical Haitian when it comes to knowledge about India. Here’s another story that illustrates just how distant and unknowable India is for Haiti even as New Delhi tries to help it recover from a massive earthquake that practically flattened Port-au-Prince three years ago.

Two Afghan teenagers -- Fawad Mohammadi and Jawanmard Paiz -- whose film 'Buzkashi Boys' was recently nominated at the Oscars, capturing the attention of Hollywood for their impressive acting, look up to Indian superstars Shah Rukh Khan and Sunny Deol as their idols.

As relations between India and Pakistan continue to thaw, opportunities for contact and dialogue have increased across a variety of areas, including diplomacy, sport and the entertainment world. In one notable development, Indian screen legend Naseeruddin Shah embarked on a week-long visit to the neighbouring country, amid hopes that joint film, theatre and other performing arts productions could become a reality down the road.

"Today's India truly enjoys soft power, and that may well be the most valuable way in which it can offer leadership to the twenty-first-century world," says Tharoor in Pax Indica: India And The World Of The 21st Century which discusses India's international relationships.

Well, we've always had soft power, which seems to have been despite the government, not because of it. We have the soft power of Bollywood, Indian cuisine, fashion, yoga and the Indian brain that has done so well with science, computers and so on

India's soft power has now been on display for at least a couple of decades: ... Bollywood's prodigious celluloid fare has long drawn huge audiences in significant parts of Asia, Africa, and beyond; India's English-language novelists have often edged out native British writers for the prestigious Man Booker Prize; and, of course, yoga studios have become all but ubiquitous in the United States.

Olli and others have created something quite new, music that not only draws on Bollywood itself, but also the inspiration the industry has sparked within non-South Asians in parts of Europe. It’s good to find something that transcends stereotypes rather than simply playing with them.