India is keen on deepening its cultural relations with Australia which would create "greater understanding" between the two countries, the Indian High Commissioner here has said. Stressing on the power of cultural and public diplomacy, Navdeep Suri said, "if we were to think India-Australia relations can only be done at government levels, we will be missing major opportunities". 

A filmmaker has teamed up with a friend she met in high school in Brooklyn Heights to produce a portrait of a girls’ school in Anupshahr, India, a community that doesn’t believe in educating women. “Break the Branch,” by director Samantha Cornwell, filmed in conjunction with music and theatre teacher Melanie Closs, is described as a “lyrical, ethereal portrait of a rural Indian girls’ school in lush, sensuous color.”

Kabali was released in 8000-10,000 screens across the world. That scale is astonishing given that India’s soft power has largely been powered by the popularity of Hindi cinema and Bollywood.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi concluded his five-day, four-nation tour of Africa on July 11. He spent two days in South Africa and made brief visits to Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya. As he left Nairobi at the end of the tour, Modi had covered 42 countries in his 51 trips abroad. Antarctica is now the only continent he has not visited in his two years in office.

The two day Asian Confluence NADI River Festival is one such example. Organized by the Asian Confluence and India, East Asia Center in Shillong, in collaboration with the Meghalaya government and the Maulana Abul Kamal Azad Institute of Asian Studies, [...] Rivers served as the central theme of discussions, as in addition to serving as a means of transport, rivers have formed as a connective narrative among people for centuries.

Yoga has offered the Indian state unprecedented opportunities for global, media-savvy political performance. In recent years, the nation has made international headlines by creating a national ministry for yoga. It has promoted yoga tourism; staged mass yoga practices and Indian officials have even proposed yoga as a national solution to an astonishing range of social problems, from reducing rape to curing cancer.

In the past year, Netanyahu has met with Russian President Vladimir Putin four different times. That has proven vital to Israel's security as Putin becomes more involved in Syria on the side of Israel's enemies. If relations with Moscow are vital for security reasons, relations with Beijing pave a path to continues economic growth. 

In an exchange programme launched by the British Council, students from the UK would soon get an opportunity to learn and understand the Indian culture through various short-term courses. According to a report in TOI, out of a group of 500 students, 50 will be joining the University of Kerala for a two-week-long course in Indian Studies.