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Maritime Silk Route emphasises on improving connectivity but more importantly, it aspires to improve China’s geo-strategic position in the world China is experiencing a “Deng Xiaoping Moment 2.0.” The new Chinese leadership

Indian deltas are sinking, and no, it is not because of sea level rise. “Humans are sinking deltas four times faster than the sea level is rising,” says American professor of oceanography and geology at the University of Colorado, James Syvitski. A proliferation of large dams that starve deltas of sediment, groundwater mining that causes land compaction, and artificial levees that affect river courses, have been responsible for the subsiding of major Indian deltas including Ganga-Brahmaputra, Krishna-Godavari, Brahmani and Mahanadi, Prof. Syvitski demonstrated in his lecture ‘The Peril of Deltas on the Indian Subcontinent: Welcome to the Anthropocene,’ at the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme held here recently. “The Krishna delta is perhaps the worst off because large dams are preventing almost any of the river’s sediments from reaching it,” he later told The Hindu. In a research paper co-authored by Professor Syvitski and published in Nature Goescience in 2009, satellite i

The paintings were done by prehistoric man with white kaolin Rock art showing bulls with humps and without humps, deer, line drawings of a human being and jungle fowl and men celebrating perhaps after a successful hunt or a cattle raid have been found in two rock shelters in Tamil Nadu. Prehistoric man did them with white kaolin. While one group of paintings can be dated to the Iron Age (circa 1500 BCE to circa 500 BCE), the second one may belong to the early historic age (circa fifth century BCE to circa third century CE). P. Balamurugan, research scholar, Department of History, Pondicherry University, discovered them in March. He found them on the right bank of the river Vaigai, near Arugaveli village, seven km east of Mayiladumparai, in the Kadamalaikundu region of Andipatti taluk, Theni district. The two rock shelters are in different locations on a small hill, forming part of the Western Ghats. K. Rajan, Professor of History, Pondicherry University, said the two rock shelters