USARiseUp

Spiritually revered by nearly one billion Hindus and worshipped as a goddess, the Ganga River (or the Ganges as it is known in the West) is India’s “mightiest” river. Its pivotal place in the nation’s collective psyche is best captured in the words of its first prime minister who described it as “the river of India” whose saga “is the [very] story of India’s civilization and culture, of the rise and fall of empires, of great and proud cities …”

Early in August, a Muslim woman was prevented from taking a dip in a swimming pool in the town of Émerainville, in the eastern outskirts on Paris, for donning a “burquini” – a baggy head-to-toe swimsuit that resembles a hooded wetsuit and is regarded as an Islamic-friendly swimwear.

In a utopian world, one would have expected the election of an African-American president to have spelled the end of the race debate in America. But ironically, it only appears to have stoked new flames.

Barely has the national burp of President Obama’s beer-diplomacy—brokered to ease racial tensions between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and police officer James Crowley—subsided than another incident has everyone talking.