A. India is self-sufficient in strategic armaments – nuclear weapons and delivery systems, including advanced and accurate ballistic and cruise missiles, and nuclear-powered submarines.

B. By focusing militarily on Pakistan and ignoring China’s challenge, India inspires little confidence about its judgment, resolve, and prospects as a consequential power in the extended region.

C. While India wishes to stand up to China and emerge as the other nodal power in Asia, this ambition is undermined by diffidence and skewed capabilities.

D. But paradoxically, India has become the world’s largest importer of conventional weaponry, leaving its foreign policy hostage to the whims and interests of vendor states.

A. Automotive interests have consciously shaped a vision of the streets as places where cars belong.

B. Indeed, the twenty-first century's apex predator is the automobile.

C. A fatal collision is an everyday phenomenon— the kind of death, it seems, that is always expected.

D. Cars prowl the streets, growling in revving ravenousness.

A. Farmers need to be encouraged to grow more pulses not simply because demand is projected to rise by roughly 50 per cent between now and 2024.

B. The Subramanian committee has rightly noted that the worst case scenario for farmers is weak government procurement combined with continuation of stock-holding and export restrictions.

C. Volatility in production and prices of pulses, the committee's report has shown, is far higher than that for cereals, and this is neither in the interests of the producers nor the consumers.

D. Pulses also help in soil rejuvenation and naturally fixing atmospheric nitrogen, without consuming much water.

A. German scientists analyzing the 3300-year-old bust have found evidence suggesting that a royal sculptor at the time may have smoothed creases around the mouth and fixed a bumpy nose to depict the 'Beauty of the Nile' in a better light.

B. The new rendering at the entrance of the Egyptian city of Samalut attempts to re-create the strangeness of the Amarna style. That is probably best done in a museum instead of on a highway, where it might scare people.

C. The miracle of the Nefertiti bust in Berlin is that it combines the realism of the Amarna style, as it is known, with a feel for grace and harmony to create one of the world’s great icons of beauty.

D. By getting the colossally awful sculpture of the ancient queen pulled down, Egyptians have shown the way forward. We need to topple art that’s an insult to our public spaces.

A. Though the “mother of all laws”, the Constitution is external to society and has a largely exhortatory relationship to it.

B. This is not a defect — the Constitution is required to reflect the republic in the best possible light, and is at its most majestic when doing so.

C. However, this also means that the Constitution is unable to directly confront obstinate realities like caste that flout its fundamental tenets, because acknowledging caste amounts to confessing that the republic is more desire than reality.

D. Right from the Preamble, where it presumes that “we, the people” are indeed a unified and homogenous collectivity, the Constitution treats hoped-for outcomes as though they were established facts.