S. Mitra Kalita

About 6%.

The grand jury hadn’t said a word yet, but the press releases foreshadowed fear. Ferguson-Florissant schools closed. Clayton schools closed. Riverview Gardens schools closed.

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to do at least 50 things in the 100 hours or so while he is on US soil. Modi’s everywhere.

Even by Indian standards, these are HUGE parties.

Breast pumps suck.

India’s new prime minister Narendra Modi released a letter today reflecting on a month in office. He vaguely refers to “allegations” and “controversies” and laments not being given a 100-day “honeymoon period” as other new leaders are often accorded. He also invokes the anniversary of the declaration of Emergency, the 21-month period in which the Indian government exercised complete control over the country. “Our democracy will not sustain if we can’t guarantee freedom of speech and expression,” vows Modi.

A fellow working mom recently told me there’s only one parenting article left she wants to read:

There’s a phrase in Assamese to describe families like ours: bhal ghor. Literally, it means “good home.” It’s thrown around a lot during matrimonial matchmaking. Or when a child applies to nursery and his mum needs to impress an admissions officer. Or if you need to send money to your village and only a stranger can do the hand-off: “He’s from a good home. Don’t worry.”

All week, the students of my alma mater, Rutgers University, have been debating the selection of former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as their commencement speaker. This morning, Rice bowed out, saying: “Commencement should be a time of joyous celebration for the graduates and their families. Rutgers’ invitation to me to speak has become a distraction for the university community at this very special time.”

With just a few months to go before summer (allegedly) arrives in the US, the annoying emails have begun.

When I was a kid and happened upon an Indian person on TV, I would scream for my parents or brothers—“Come quick, before they’re gone!”

Tweets by Indian politician Shashi Tharoor and his wife Sunanda Pushkar have been under massive scrutiny in recent days. Pushkar was found dead Friday in a five-star hotel in New Delhi, capping off a bizarre week of allegations, many through social media, that her husband was cheating on her with a Pakistani journalist (and then came subsequent retractions). Quartz examined 86 days of their tweets, the most available through the Twitter API and not including those that have since been deleted. Still, several interesting patterns emerge:

A free society is an “ideal for which I am prepared to die,” Nelson Mandela famously said. On April 20, 1964, instead of testifying during his trial on charges of sabotage, he held a court spellbound for more than four hours. Two months later, Mandela and other activists were sentenced to life in prison.

Really, it’s okay to go to Kohl’s or Macy’s, Target or Walmart, today. We’re Americans: We shop, we work, we are.

In 2001, a tiny startup in New Delhi nearly brought down the Indian government with a sting operation exposing bribery in defense deals. The magazine, named Tehelka after the Hindi word for “sensation,” broadcast footage online that implicated politicians and military officials; some resigned.

A few years ago, my daughter’s school switched from Spanish once a week to Mandarin Chinese. Having studied both languages, I was very much opposed to the move, but the decision was made with little input. And so my 9-year-old is studying the language everyone says is our future.

NEW YORK—Until just a few weeks ago, nobody thought Bill de Blasio had a chance. He is way too liberal for the New York City we’ve become, the one that has eradicated crime, busted unions, and put porn shops and squeegee guys out of business.

New Delhi is trying to outdo New York City’s Central Park. Efforts are underway to carve a 1,200-acre green space by adjoining many such smaller spaces in the central part of India’s capital. Quartz asked the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, the folks behind the restoration, for photos and renderings of the grand plan. Here’s the initial vision:

The prescient economist A. Gary Shilling says US growth is going to remain slow for some time to come. In a piece for Bloomberg View yesterday, he wrote that the US is about five years into a process of deleveraging—the reduction of debt on its balance sheet—to make up for years of excess. And then came the bad news:

Cvent’s successful IPO today follows that of a lot of cloud-based providers. But its performance is also a good sign for a much older business model: offshoring.

There’s a lot Jeff Bezos needs to change about the way the Washington Post works. He’s pledged to keep the current publisher and editor in place, and many people are rightly skeptical on whether that’s a sound strategy.

Move over, Keynes and Hayek. The dueling economists everyone’s talking about now are from India: Jagdish Bhagwati and Amartya Sen.

The waiting game is on in France. More than 600,000 people in France have just wrapped up the test needed to secure a high-school diploma, the baccalauréat (better known as le bac) and results should be out next week. Today’s New York Times reports on general disillusionment with the exam, saying it “focuses too little on logic or creativity … and too much on rote knowledge and the esoterica that thrill the Parisian cultural aristocracy.”

The US Supreme Court just side-stepped making any major decision in Fisher vs. University of Texas and asked the lower courts for a do-over on the affirmative action case. Somehow, keeping the issue alive denies the reality that I and so many other beneficiaries of set-aside programs know: Affirmative action is already dead.