Aamir Khan: Comeback Khan

The actor pins his hopes on Sitaare Zameen Par for a career rebound

What happens when one of India’s most beloved performers bares his wounds to the world in a series of interviews? To a world standing on its head, where public hounding is normalised and toxic troll­ing becomes a national pastime? Aamir Khan, one of India’s biggest stars, has been through a lot in the last few years. A divorce from his second wife, filmmaker Kiran Rao. A public rejection of his magnum opus, a remake of Forrest Gump, Laal Singh Chaddha. A seasonal questioning of his nationalism, whether he is seen with the wife of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or whether he has suppos­edly been silent in the aftermath of the Pahalgam attacks.

Those who wish him well hope this new film will bring him luck. In his 60th year, it has him playing a has-been bas­ketball coach who has the onerous task of making a bunch of misfits into a winning team. His Gulshan is not a likeable man, given to drinking, which lands him with the impos­sible assignment as community service. The film Sitaare Zameen Par is a spiritual sequel to his 2007 hit Taare Zameen Par, in which he played a supportive mentor to an ostracised child with dyslexia.

That film helped push children with disorders on the autism spectrum out of the shadows and into mainstream discourse. It was not new territory for Khan. His films have managed to entertain and enlighten, whether it is 3 Idiots (2009) or Dangal (2016). His TV series, Satyameva Jayate, begin­ning in 2012 across two seasons, routinely unravelled social prejudices and examined closeted attitudes. And his ads were little masterpieces in marketing.

His fans and he will hope Sitaare Zameen Par returns him to that exalted position. (By Kaveree Bamzai)

The Big Picture

Tehran, June 15, 2025: Precision Strikes
The skyline of the Iranian capital lit by fires from Israeli strikes
two days after Operation Rising Lion began with targeted killings
of top Iranian military commanders and nuclear scientists
as well as the bombing of nuclear facilities.

Noisemaker
Congress Trolls: Lingua Fracas

Congress-aligned social media trolls dialled a wrong number in trying to mock Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s English by circulating bits of his informal conversations at the G7 summit. For one, Modi doesn’t have a problem communicating in English and his interlocutors understand him perfectly. Then the prime minister chooses to speak in Hindi which best conveys his message. The attempt to run down Modi only resulted in providing BJP an opportunity to underline the elitist leanings of his critics.

Ideas
Migration

Modern humans living outside Africa today trace their ancestry to a group of Homo sapiens who spread out of the continent about 50,000 years ago. It is one of those big questions about our origins that have remained unanswered. What made it possible for humans to be migrate out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, when every such wave before it had failed?
A new study, published in Nature, finds that this was probably because humans started becoming extraordinarily adaptable in Africa about 70,000 years ago. Analysing hundreds of archaeological sites across Africa over the past 120,000 years, the researchers measured the range of environmental conditions in which humans lived in Africa. They found that while the earliest humans were fairly versatile and lived in a range of habitats, these humans did not venture into more extreme environments. But 70,000 years ago, a sudden shift occurred, and humans began to push into more challenging environments. The researchers speculate climate change may have been responsible. The world had entered an ice age by then, and many regions in Africa would have begun witnessing less rainfall. Our ancestors were thus forced to move into environments they hadn’t contended with before. Learning to adapt and acquire new skills, they would have also become more connected with others they had previously been cut off from. This rise in adaptability could explain why humans succeeded in migrating out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, when all before them had failed.

Money Mantra
Oil On The Boil

Rising crude prices are a good reason to push clean energy

CRUDE OIL PLAYS a pivotal role in the Indian economy. Despite being the world’s third-largest consumer of oil, India imports more than 85 per cent of its crude requirements. As a result, any spike in global crude oil prices has a direct and widespread impact on multiple layers of the Indian economy—from inflation to fiscal health, trade balances to consumer spending, and even monetary policy decisions.

Beyond currency pressure, rising oil prices seep into the domestic economy through fuel price inflation. Although petrol and diesel prices in India are deregulated, the government often steps in to shield consumers from sharp price shocks. This often comes at the cost of higher subsidies or reduced taxes, impacting government revenue and fiscal deficit targets.

Moreover, fuel prices are not isolated from other sectors. Transport and logistics costs rise, leading to a cascading effect on food prices, manufactured goods, and services. This type of cost-push inflation forces the Reserve Bank of India to consider tightening monetary policy by raising interest rates, which can slow down investment and consumer demand.

Against this backdrop, the rise of electric vehicles (EVs) in India offers a compelling long-term solution. EVs do not rely on petrol or diesel, and thus their adoption has the potential to structurally reduce India’s dependence on crude oil imports.

However, the transition will take time. As of now, EV penetration is still relatively low, with most progress seen in two-wheelers and urban fleets like taxis and delivery vehicles. For large-scale impact on oil demand, the passenger vehicle segment and heavy commercial vehicles must also make the shift.
Moreover, India’s electricity generation is still heavily reliant on coal, which reduces the overall ‘clean’ impact of EVs unless the energy mix also shifts toward renewables.

In the long term, a successful transition to electric mobility could significantly reduce India’s vulnerability to global oil shocks. (By Ramesh Singh)

Viral
Garba at the Burj Khalifa

A tourist who takes the elevator right up to the top of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai will probably have a few expectations from the trip. He or she would want to know what it feels like to be this high above the ground, or want to get this view of the city’s glittering skyline; or perhaps he or she is here just for the experience. What someone most certainly would not be expecting is for a garba performance to break out. And that is exactly what happened recently. A video that has gone viral shows a group of Indian tourists, dressed in bright yellow t-shirts, breaking out into a spirited garba performance at the building’s observational deck. None of the other tourists seemed to give the performance much notice. But online, the video led to much debate, with many berating the group for being inconsiderate towards others and displaying poor tourist etiquette.

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