Culture Kitchen is a new Bay Area-based culinary school where women share their family recipes and insight into their cultural backgrounds. By exploring these access points in an intimate, hands-on setting, Sturges and Lopez think they can create valuable exchanges and interactions between different ethnic backgrounds.

DreamWorks Animation has become the second Hollywood studio to enter into a distribution agreement with China's top online video site, Youku.com. Youku said Monday that it had signed a deal with the Glendale-based animation studio to distribute the "Kung Fu Panda" movies in China, marking the first time that DreamWorks releases have been made available in that country through the Internet.

Taiwan has been a relatively quiet player in the tense dispute about territorial claims in the South China Sea. That could change with an unusual initiative that Taipei says is a peaceful approach to asserting its sovereignty in a body of water where China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei also have claims. The plan involves tourists, rare turtles and a remote atoll.

An important asset that New Delhi has failed to exploit vis-à-vis its neighbours is its soft power. Sports, economy, Bollywood, education, infrastructure, healthcare, tourism, history and heritage — there is so much that can be used by the country to influence its neighbourhood.

New dialogue between the South Asian rivals calls for a new form of diplomacy, where top officials can go out, eat familiar cuisines and sit between the very people whose fate they are negotiating. This would give them a feel of how welcoming and hospitable one neighbour can be to another.

So goes one of the fundamental laws of physics. In the face of recent "actions" in the West -- economic crisis and rampant Islamophobia, there is an inexorable "reaction", as the eternal values of Islam continue to manifest themselves.

The power of cultural relations is in evoking rather than projecting values. We create openness and build trust. Ideologies which require violence and oppression to thrive are threatened by this work. The soft power of cultural relations is often most valuable in the hardest of locations.

“And what is more intensive is the cultural diplomacy. There is greater interest from other countries in what we are doing. I did a briefing for 55 consular corps in Scotland this week. That is my job: it’s who we are, where we are, and where we want to be.”