For over a decade, South Korean businessmen and officials have regularly met with representatives of the Maghreb and most developed countries in Central Africa. [...] Furthermore, the author stressed the role of "soft power" in Seoul’s presence in Africa.  "South Korea is a recognized international power. It wants to have an international policy adequate to this status," Dayez-Burgeon noted.

Indians — especially the youth — are learning Korean, eating kimchi and travelling to Seoul to sample the life shown on their favourite TV dramas, and films [...] Over the last decade, K-pop and K-dramas, as well as their movies, have unleashed a tsunami of growth and popularity in India, and the numbers of avid fans continue to grow exponentially.

With China not budging from its position on India's NSG bid, Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar has called for a "sensible and pragmatic" conversation between the two sides on how "not accommodating" each others aspiration was detrimental to the overall relationship. The Foreign Secretary also observed India should use its soft power and do more in improving its image in China as people there do not have a very fair idea about the country.

The BBC World Service has outlined plans to increase the number of languages in which it broadcasts from 29 to 40 – in a drive to reach half a billion people across the world by 2022. It is the biggest expansion of the broadcaster in more than 70 years, and a signal that Britain aims to exercise its soft power more vigorously.

The Government has taken a new initiative to create a Film Promotion Fund to promote Indian cinema in the International Film Festivals. This initiative would help independent filmmakers to promote their work across the globe. The Government efforts to project India as a soft power and filming destination has been a win-win situation so far, in terms of attracting global stakeholders from various quarters of film industry to India as well as Indian films, expertise and talent being accepted globally at international festivals.

In times of terror, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is an icon of world peace. The spiritual leader speaks to S Gurumurthy about his mediation in Colombia to bring the armed rebels to the negotiation table and how he applied the Gandhian principle of non-violence, and ancient Indian values of yoga and meditation to rid the world of violence and mould it into One Family.