Soutik Biswas

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If you are a tea connoisseur, here's some bad news: your morning cuppa of steaming Darjeeling tea may soon be difficult to get.

Famously called the "champagne of teas", it is grown in 87 gardens in the foothills of the Himalayas in Darjeeling in West Bengal state. Some of the bushes are as old as 150 years and were introduced to the region by a Scottish surgeon.

Half of the more than 8 million kg - 60% of it is certified organic - of this sought-after tea produced every year is exported, mainly to the UK, Europe and Japan. The tea tots up nearly $80m (£60m) in annual sales.

Darjeeling tea is also one of the world's most expensive - some of it has fetched prices of up to $850 (£647) per kg. The tea is also India's first Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) product.

Since June, Darjeeling has been hit by violent protests and prolonged strikes in support of a campaign by a local party demanding a separate state for the area's majority Nepali-speaking Gorkha community.

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Does the Indian president serve a purely ceremonial role? Is this a mere figurehead who, in the words of former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, is a "head that neither reigns nor governs", and holds a position of "authority or dignity" more than anything else?

Last month's election of Ram Nath Kovind as the republic's 14th president reignited the debate. In his inaugural speech, President Kovind, a former spokesman for the ruling BJP, promised citizens he would "stay true to the trust that they have bestowed me".

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Christopher Nolan's epic World War Two film, Dunkirk, which tells the story of the mass evacuation of Allied troops from the northern coast of France in 1940, has been getting glowing reviews in India.

But many are glowering over Nolan turning a blind eye to the role of Indian soldiers in the battle. The Times of India wrote that their "significant contribution" was missing from Nolan's "otherwise brilliant" work. Writing for Bloomberg View, columnist Mihir Sharma said the film "adds to the falsehood that plucky Britons stood alone against Nazi Germany once France fell, when, in fact, hundreds of millions of imperial subjects stood, perforce, with them".

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If you browse through the latest headlines about the now month-long border stand-off between India and China, you might think the Asian rivals are teetering on the brink of an armed conflict.

The rhetoric is full of foreboding and menace. A Delhi newspaper says China is warning that the stand-off "could escalate into full-scale conflict". Another echoes a similar sentiment, saying "China stiffens face-off posture".

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For nearly half a century, Mother Teresa, the Roman Catholic nun who worked with the poor in the Indian city of Kolkata (Calcutta) wore a simple white sari with three blue stripes on the borders, one thicker than the rest. Senior nuns who work for Missionaries of Charity, a 67-year-old sisterhood which has more than 3,000 nuns worldwide, continue to wear what has now become the religious uniform of this global order.

On Monday, news washed up that this "famous" sari of the Nobel laureate nun, who died in 1997, has been trademarked to prevent "unfair" use by people for commercial purposes. India's government quietly recognised the sari as the intellectual property of the Missionaries of Charity in September last year, when the nun was declared a saint by the Vatican, but the order had decided not to make it public.

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Last month Prime Minister Narendra Modi said murder in the name of cow protection is "not acceptable". Hours after his comments, a Muslim man was reportedly killed by a mob who accused him of transporting beef in his car.

Under Mr Modi's Hindu nationalist BJP, the cow has become a polarising animal and religious divisions are widening. Restrictions on the sale and slaughter of cows are fanning confusion and vigilantism.

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On Thursday a 15-year-old Muslim boy, returning home from Eid shopping with his three brothers, was killed in a brutal assault by a mob of about 20 men on a train in the north Indian state of Haryana.

Police say that the reason for Junaid Khan's murder - in which his three siblings were also injured by the knife-wielding mob - was mainly because of a row over seat space on the train.

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Farmers are on the boil again in India.

In western Maharashtra state, they have been on strike for a week in some seven districts now, spilling milk on the streets, shutting down markets, protesting on the roads and attacking vegetable trucks. In neighbouring Madhya Pradesh, curfew has been imposed after five farmers were killed in clashes with police on Tuesday. Last month, farmers in southern Telangana and Andhra Pradesh staged protests and burnt their red chilli crop.

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"Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence," writes Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy in The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness, her whimsically titled second novel.

"It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labours and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules of how a people as complex, as diverse as we are continue to coexist - continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another."

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A lawmaker from India's southern state of Kerala has announced that he is returning to eating meat, fish and eggs after practising vegetarianism for nearly two decades.

There's nothing unusual about a lapsed vegetarian but VT Balram said his decision was prompted by the federal Hindu nationalist BJP government's attempt to seize the people's right to eat what they wanted.