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Saturday, April 16 this year marks what would have been the 133rd birthday of one of the most iconic entertainers in modern history, Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin’s career spanned more than 75 years, from his childhood in the Victorian era to the late 1970s.

India is making all the wrong noises on the cryptocurrency front! In the 10 days beginning April 1, transaction volume on top Indian crypto exchanges such as WazirX, CoinSwitchKuber, CoinDCX, and ZebPay, have declined by over 90 percent, normalized to last year. For context, WazirX, the largest Indian crypto exchange by volume, had reported $44 billion in trading volume in 2021. Now, their business has come down by up to 98%, which is virtually a complete washout of their trading volume.

And we thought Congress President for 19 years, Sonia Gandhi, before Rahul Gandhi took charge, was a Congress party member. And the UPA Prime Minister of India Dr. Manmohan Singh was also a Congress member. Ditto Rahul Gandhi. The reality is, all three enrolled as Congress members, only in a digital membership drive which is still continuing.

March 2022 has given a clear indication of a deadly cocktail brewing in India with rising inflation, vanishing employment but falling unemployment rate, disappearing jobs from the non-agriculture sector, and the workforce losing jobs in non-agriculture sector returning to agriculture where unemployment is disguised under very low earning. In brief, the symptoms are the manifestation of a great economic distress, both for individuals and the country.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced at the Glasgow UN climate change conference that India will meet a target of net-zero emissions by 2070. This means that India will face major energy transition challenge moving away from fossil fuels, which accounts for significant share of Indian government’s tax revenue.

Some political commentators have argued that the stand taken by the Modi government on the conflict in Ukraine shows that it is wrong to consider India a subordinate ally of the United States. The fact that India has abstained on resolutions in the United Nations condemning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and the decision of the government to buy small quantities of crude oil from Russia, notwithstanding the US stand that countries should not buy Russian oil or gas, is seen as an illustration of India’s independent foreign policy and strategic autonomy.

Two competing perspectives can be extracted from the ongoing drama in Pakistan. The first is the obvious one, of the continued fragility of democracy and its institutions that leads to periodic crises of the kind that unfolded over the past month. That no prime minister has ever completed a full five-year term in the country is a raging symptom of that fragility.

Russia’s suspension from the United Nations Human Rights Council was long overdue, even without the mass killing of innocent civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha. A country that poisons or otherwise does away with its critics at home and abroad and stifles freedom of the press, expression, and association should not qualify for a seat on the Council.

The outcome was never in doubt: Andrés Manuel López Obrador was going to win Mexico’s historic recall election on Sunday, April 10. And he did, with 91.86 percent of the vote — or 15.1 million out of 16.5 million votes cast. The election is important on two counts. In addition to ensuring that AMLO will remain in office until the conclusion of his term in September of 2024, the election also establishes an important precedent that Mexican presidents and governors, once considered untouchable, can be subject to removal from office before their terms are over.

Since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, India has not taken any position at the United Nations (UN). In all of the voting, India has abstained.