1. The new Goods and Services tax will end the powers of states to tax leading to them borrowing money recklessly, argues Partha Chatterjee in the Economic Times.
  2. Indian foreign policy seems to have lost all coherence, says Sunanda K. Datta-Ray in the Telegraph.
  3. Junaid was my son and the son of those who travelled with him on the train that day, writes Harsh Mander in the Indian Express. Yet they left him to die.
  4. A GST with a difference: In Nagaland, locals want militant groups to levy one “tax” on them, reports Rahul Karmakar in the Hindustan Times.
  5. Lynchistan: Mob violence was actually falling under the United Progressive Alliance but after Modi took office it has seen a sharp uptake, writes Rupa Subramanya in Orfonline.org.
  6. Under Modi, the secular nation of Gandhi and Nehru has vanished, writes Aatish Taseer in the Wall Street Journal.
  7. Gauhar Jaan, the country’s earliest recording sensation, was known as much for her musical talent as for her ostentatious lifestyle, writes Manu S Pillai in Mint.
  8. With its recordings of over one lakh songs sung by rural women of Maharashtra while crushing grains, the 25-year-old Grindmill Songs Project is a rich repository of oral history, reports Shriya Mohan in the Business Line.
  9. The theory of dark matter – massive, clustering particles that are invisible to light – might have got a boost with a sweeping news study, writes Ethan Siegal in Forbes.
  10. Writing in the Friday Times, Aslam Khwaja describes how the 1946 Royal Indian Navy revolt in Karachi shook the Raj.
  11. The rise of the thought leader: In the New Republic, David Session describes how the superrich have funded a new class of intellectual in the United States.

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