India is likely to bolster its 'Look East Act East' policy with a good dose of Buddhism and project it as a cultural and civilisational bridge with the countries in South East Asia. Modi himself gave enough indications of this in his speech on Monday.

Even as the Narendra Modi government talks big about projecting India’s soft power, India’s main instrument for cultural diplomacy continues to wallow in severe fund crunch, forcing it to now open new cultural centres abroad only in collaboration with private organisations.

To the outside world, the rapport between India and Pakistan is characterised by the political tensions that have simmered, and at times boiled over, since partition in 1947. Yet contemporary art is an arena in which the two nations enjoy a more fruitful relationship.

In India as part of a cultural exchange, Shirzad and three of his countrymen, two chefs and an administrator, are at the ITC Maurya, in Delhi, for a 10-day festival celebrating Afghani cuisine, after which they return with a similarly assembled Indian team to the Inter-Continental in Kabul for a 10-day showcase of Indian food.

A joint statement by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her Spanish counterpart Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said both countries have expressed their interest in taking full advantage of trade agreements in order to enhance the transformative impact of their respective economic policies.

Prime minister Narendra Modi is the third most followed and fifth most influential leader globally, according to a new report called Twiplomacy 2015, a study of world leaders on Twitter Inc by global public relations and communications firm Burson-Marsteller. The study identified 669 Twitter accounts of heads of state and government, foreign ministers and their institutions in 166 countries worldwide to analyse each leader’s Twitter profile, tweet history, and connections with the others.

As one of quake-stricken Nepal’s closest neighbours—sharing a common frontier with road and air connectivity, open borders that do not require visas, besides cultural, language and other commonalities between the two, India was perhaps the best placed to offer succour to Nepal.

After the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that flattened parts of the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu on Saturday and unleashed avalanches on Mount Everest, India and China barely missed a beat. Within hours of the disaster, Prime Minister Narendra Modi dispatched military aircraft carrying workers, medicines and blankets.