As part of its public diplomacy outreach, the ministry of external affairs has donned...a special documentary on the life of master modernist Satish Gujral, the artist who overcame physical challenges to become a stalwart of contemporary Indian art.

The IT industry has taken to the global stage India's ‘soft power' and made India as a knowledge power. “Indians are looked upon by global companies for leadership. You have kindled among millions of young Indians the power of using knowledge as a passport to the future...."

Humor represents a more oblique manner of communicating ideas, and therefore can be a powerful medium to conduct public diplomacy. The beauty of using humor as a means to transmit ideas is that the jovial nature of comedy can indirectly communicate weightier subjects in a lighthearted manner that can diffuse weighty realities.

The Indus is a transboundary stream governed between Pakistan and India through the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960. Celebrated by two generations of policy experts as a model of water diplomacy, the treaty has been subject to much acrimony, doubt and expert and lay speculation in the past decade. The underlying issue is that water scarcity in the region has increased significantly over the past decade.

“If you are going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise, they’ll kill you.”
-George Bernard Shaw

I used to think that humor was one thing that didn’t translate in cross-cultural communication. In my travels, I had watched numerous attempts at jokes fail miserably as they got lost in translation or cultural nuances. Things often ended awkwardly amid the seemingly untranslatable nature of humor.

India was known for tolerance, spices, camels and austerity. Shashi Tharoor said that India has developed not only through trade and politics but through its soft power. This takes place through its ability to share its culture with the rest of the world via food, music, technology, and Bollywood.

The strategy of the Indian state is clearly no longer limited to building infrastructure alone; it has moved to a domain where the production and projection of images of a prosperous nation has become as imperative a task as the creation of a prosperous nation itself.