On the whole, foreign investors find India an excellent investment opportunity that relates to the arena of “needs and wants” marketing, as opposed to “desires and aspirations” marketing. For the latter, China is an excellent destination, and not India.

A need to engage with industry on an equal plane while Indian industry, too, stops crawling when asked to walk....If we don’t get any of the above done, GDP growth notwithstanding, the reputational damage we would have caused Brand India will be immeasurable. So someone needs to wake up and pretty soon at that.

Shared identity is unsustainable without incorporating culture and sports under the European umbrella, and football might prove to be one of the highest hurdles to jump on the road to Europeanization.

Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute (PRI) and a renowned China expert, will testify before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs today on the subject of the various "Confucius Institutes" being put in place all over the United States. These institutes... represent a significant threat to U.S. national security and an attempt to enhance China's "soft power" globally.

BRICS, grouping Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, has set a distinctive example of great powers rising with "soft power," said Boris Martynov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Latin America Institute.

And all of this may in the end be an attribute of America's vaunted soft power - our foreign policy is not made in a hermetically sealed environment by wise-men-for-life but rather rises from the give and take of our democratic process, which at the end of the day is open to all.

Many Indian analysts accept their country is unlikely to make good the economic and developmental gulf that separates the two regional rivals, but say that India's "soft power" and "cultural influence" is an advantage.