The healing touch provided by the feel-good diplomacy for the return of Geeta from Pakistan has evaporated with the cancellation of the Delhi concert by Ghazal maestro Ghulam Ali. While the Ministry of External Affairs refuses to acknowledge any setback to India-Pakistan people-to-people relationship, the Pakistani civil society figures think otherwise.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, who wooed Nepalis on his two visits last year, during which he promoted his “neighborhood first” diplomacy, is now an object of scorn. Some people have burned effigies of him, and a #BackoffIndia hashtag was recently trending on Twitter. While Nepal’s allies, including China, welcomed the new Constitution, India merely “noted” it.

Several years ago, Erin Zaikis was working in rural Thailand. She was surprised to see how many children in the village didn’t wash their hands with soap, much less know what soap was. In 2013 Zaikis founded Sundara, a nonprofit working to improve hygiene and prevent disease in poor communities in India, Uganda and Myanmar by recycling used bars of hotel soap. 

The Ministry of External Affairs is getting ready to promote the global discipline of Indology as a soft diplomatic platform.[...] Indology, which includes the study of the Vedas, Vedanta, Upanishads and the Sanskrit classics, has a global pool of scholars who can project India’s core civilizational values effectively on the global stage, said Karan Singh, former president of the ICCR and one of the prominent speakers at the event. 

India has been placed as the globe's seventh most valued 'nation brand' in 2015, moving up one notch from eighth position in 2014. With an increase of 32 per cent in its brand value to USD 2.137 billion (from USD 1.621 in 2014), , according to Brand Finance, which brought out its annual report on the world's most valuable nation brands in October 2015.

The main assertion of Deep K. Datta-Ray is that Indian diplomacy is rooted in the Mahabharata , which predates modern Western diplomacy by several centuries. The author presents his case ably and at great length. He illuminates Indian diplomacy’s lifeline to our ancient heritage and brings the analysis all the way to the present.

The third India-Africa Forum Summit has been depicted as truly historic. It is so for three reasons: it was the largest assembly of African leaders outside Africa; the biggest gathering of Africa’s 41 heads of state/government on Indian soil; and it saw India unveiling a bigger development cooperation package than ever before.

India’s rich cultural heritage will be at show when the third India-Africa Forum Summit gets underway on Tuesday. Apart from a cultural event during the banquet being hosted by the President for the visiting dignitaries, a mix of Indian traditional cultural exposure to monuments as well as a modern fashion show, which will highlight the handlooms of Varanasi [...]